When It All Falls Down (16)

I’ve bitten my nails for as long as I can remember. Down to the quick, a subconscious impulse and bad habit that I’ve failed to shake as an adult. Why do I do it? It’s unsightly, destructive and unhealthy. I’ve come to realize it’s a culmination of things: control, compulsion, stress reliever, and distraction. I do it aimlessly in between thoughts, while pouring through racks of sweaters, curled up on the couch with a cup of tea in one hand, opposite index finger between my teeth. I do it when I’m bored, when I’m in the throws of an uncomfortable conversation, or waiting patiently in the doctor’s offce. Most all of all, I do it when I worry.

Worry; the unwanted and uninvited cousin of assurance. Lately, the worrisome bothers of life have piled up, reminding me that even doing the next right thing each day can’t prevent life’s curveballs. Bills piling up, the continued struggle to save and get ahead, personal conflicts and the everyday nuisances of broken toaster ovens, stuck doors, and worn out brakes that need replacing.

As a person in recovery, I often think to myself “how could the worst not be over? How could I possibly keep getting hit with things I thought my newly embraced lifesyle would prevent?” But the reality is that just because I am sober, things will not magically fall into place. I will continue to make mistakes and be imperfect. The world will keep spinning on an ever teetering axis. Things will go wrong or differently than I imagined.

When I’ve come to a cross roads, when I feel that urgency to create the next chapter in my life, I’ve come to appreciate the Robert Frost ideal of taking the road less traveled. A very good and successful friend of mine recently reminded me that hard work and determination open doors, generate opportunity and keep the mind focused. I spent so much time and money in my past feeding my addiction, why is it now that I am unwilling to impart the effort where it counts? The answer is fear and doubt. It’s complacency and the thought that things will carry on as they are and my dreams should stay just that. That’s when I pull my little secret out of my back pocket and remind myself of it’s power: the key to everything is the belief it can happen. Accompanied by mother’s always encouraging mantra “everything will work out.”

It’s been quite awhile since I’ve written here, making excuses of exhaustion, of time better spent or not enough, of puppy walks and dinners that need to be made, household chores and selfish relaxation. I am my own obstacle and aid. I can create both the blockage and the clearance. And with the new year approaching, I have decided to chase new opportunities no matter the outcome, disappointing or successful.

Sometimes when it rains, it pours. Be brave enough to swim through the rush to wherever it leads.








**Take what you like and leave the rest**

Kingdom, my kingdom (15)



           While I sat on my porch looking up at the evening sky, the whimpering wind rustled softly through the trees and provoked them to tango with the beat of the universe, taunting everything below. As I admired their magnificence, I imagined other people across the globe also sitting on a starlit deck or in their favorite cozy nook, struggling with their everyday problems as I do. All of them contesting troubles that life has no intention of giving them the luxury to remedy.

Never have I encountered such a dichotomy as “relinquishing control.” It is both terrifying and liberating; maddening and calming; cerebral and spiritual.  Although I adhered to a yielding enterprise long ago, there is still a part of me that believes I can turn the tides if I just hang on long enough. It's not easy to accept the smallness of ourselves and the things or people we cannot change.

          But sometimes it really is a matter of overcoming your desire to steer the ship and giving into your higher self; the self that listens to its intuitions, protective instincts, and ability to adapt and evolve as nature intends. Human beings are incredibly resilient creatures: we fight, love, betray, support, commiserate, laugh, indulge, deprive, ignore, injure, heal, obsess, resist and endure.

I believe that resiliency and humility are the two greatest attributes a person can have.  To me, they are more valuable than intelligence, than confidence, than talent or good natured intent, because things happen all the time that do not afford or benefit from provision, intellect or pride. My favorite poem since the age of 10 is the “If” poem by Rudyard Kipling. For me, the most powerful sections of the poem are the middle two:

If you can dream—and not make dreams your master;

If you can think—and not make thoughts your aim;

If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster

And treat those two impostors just the same;

If you can bear to hear the truth you’ve spoken

Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools,

Or watch the things you gave your life to, broken,

And stoop and build ’em up with worn-out tools:

If you can make one heap of all your winnings

And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss,

And lose, and start again at your beginnings

And never breathe a word about your loss;

If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew

To serve your turn long after they are gone,

And so hold on when there is nothing in you

Except the Will which says to them: ‘Hold on!’

     These lines along with the preceding and succeeding constitute the ending truism of what unlocks the door to happiness and ultimately enables a boy to become man.

            A friend of mine shared with me the story of her enlightening repartee  with a former co-worker. A Nigerian woman with four incredibly hard to pronounce monikers and a jovial, other worldly demeanor would dispense her motherly and spiritual knowledge whenever my friend was clearly going through rough times. “One day you will find peace,” she’d say in her thick accent. “Let me know when you reach your kingdom.”

          One thing that will surely prevent you from claiming your personal throne are ghosts. Ghosts take shape in many forms. They'll haunt you in the form of regrets; thoughts of old, destructive relationships and the wrong doings of others; in missed opportunities and the coulda, shoulda, wouldas. Singer Ella Henderson perfectly lyricises this dilemma in her song aptly titled "Ghost"

"I keep going to the river to pray

cause' I need something that can wash out the pain

and at most I'm sleeping all these demons away

but your ghost, the ghost of you 

it keeps me awake

Give up the ghost, stop the haunting baby"

VEVO "Ghost"

          When it came time in my recovery to put my resentments down on paper, I struggled. Not because I didn’t want to relive my past or give credit to someone for negatively affecting my life, but because I had a hard time discovering any. For as long as I can remember, I managed to convince myself that I was the one at fault, the one to blame for the reactions of others.  I absorbed every aspect of the indiscretion, the heartache, the wrong. I never stood up to my ghosts. I let them haunt me from the shadows like bumps in the night and then materialize in the form of a stiff drink.

People will continue to come and go in my life, but I have the choice as to whether I let them skulk in the obscurity and crevices of my mind or if I let them gracefully fade away. With that being said, you cannot control the actions of others and their attempts to hold onto what was, but you can be firm and clear in a compassionate yet definitive way.

I have always been drawn to psychological thrillers and art of the morose persuasion. One of my favorite short stories of all time is Edgar Allen Poe’s “The Tell Tale Heart.” Edvard Munch’s “The Scream” is a painting I have revered since a young age. Anything by Hitchcock and movies such as “Silence of the Lambs,” “Shutter Island,” “Girl, Interrupted,” and “Black Swan” top my list of go to treasures, while moody artists like Lana Del Rey and Nirvana evoke an inspiring anguish. But my real life does not have to be a tangled web of vexatious, unnerving and attenuating circumstances.  I do not have to live in fear of the unknown. When I rest my head at night, I do not have to succumb to sadness from wounds that should have healed.  And I can let go of my ghosts and wearisome burdens because I know they are a poison and a cancer waiting to ruin and triumph over my mind, body and spirit.

            So in this new year of obstacles and opportunities, let the past feed your recuperative spirit and then put it behind you and move on until you reach it: the Third Noble Truth of Nirvana; self-awareness; inner peace, or however you define it, 

your kingdom is waiting for you

***take what you like and leave the rest***