Anonymous not unanimous

It has rained all day and there is flooding in low-lying areas of the Overberg. My puppies have new cowhide toy shoes to chew on.   They lie there on the carpet of my study chewing and giving big pink-mouthed yawns.

 

In between eating too much homemade bread and working like a drudge, I have been doing a moral inventory. Step 4 taught me something about ‘accurate self-appraisal’ and how to go about growing up. I forget those skills very quickly if I’m not paying attention to my life. The way I forget that liberating wonderful relief I felt after doing Step 5, coming home and looking at a new person in the bathroom mirror.

 

“Once we have taken this step, withholding nothing, we are delighted. We can look the world in the eye. We can be alone at perfect peace and ease. Our fears fall from us. We begin to feel the nearness of our Creator. We may have had certain spiritual beliefs, but now we begin to have a spiritual experience. The feeling that the drink problem has disappeared will often come strongly. We feel we are on the Broad Highway, walking hand in hand with the Spirit of the Universe.” — Alcoholics Anonymous, p. 75

 

For some reason I am getting peculiar comments on my blog (deleted in moderation) from someone who thinks AA is a cult. This, mind you, is sombody who wants everyone to think the way he does, to come to exactly the same paranoid and fear-driven conclusions. Even if he were to sit in on the most lively anarchic meetings I have attended, he would still want to see AA as full of the brainwashed living dead. Zombie zone.

 

Since I came into AA I have felt free to ask questions, draw my own conclusions and ‘Think! Think! Think!’ I am sure much of what I have come up with, all freshly minted and original in my newly sober head, sounds very same-old, same-old or just plain misguided to those who have eight or 15 or 26 years of sobriety. But I am where I am, and staying sober with it and this is the best I can do for now.

 

At school I always enjoyed debate. I liked people to argue passionately and air their differences. I am often surprised by how strongly I feel on many issues when I have to defend them. And I disagree fiercely (and silently) with speakers in meetings and then go home and realise they were saying something that resonates within, telling deeper and more uncomfortable truths than I had been ready to admit.

 

There is tension in AA between the traditional steady and unchanging aspects, the principles and ways of ensuring stability; and the evolving challenging new attitudes and differences that sometimes jar older members so much. Many of the members who attended my Cape Town meetings, crowded with young people, were Buddhist. Most were bussed in from rehab centres and did not want to be there, identified themselves as addicts rather than old-fashioned hopeless drunks. And yet their rawness, difficult questions and desperation gave those meetings an edge and authenticity I did not find in more settled and cosy meetings full of long-sober members who were close friends.

 We share a common purpose, that is a given. But conflict is a growth point, whether we like it or not. Conflict guarantees independence of thought and freedom of speech as we move towards tolerance of diversity, a willingness to listen to different points of view globally and locally. An older friend always says to me: ‘This is Alcoholics Anonymous not Unanimous’ and cautions against rigidity and  the fatal  fondness we all feel for consensus and likeminded social networking. We need the edge.

Drudgery and trudging

Struggling to finish a report, dense political and social analysis and page after page of fact-checking.

 

Slept very badly, wokn at 5am by excited puppies. The unseasonal rains continue, akin to monsoon downpours. At 6am my neighbour arrived in a mackintosh to flood the back garden with leiwater. I was too gobsmacked to say much to him.

‘The garden is wet enough already,’ I pointed out, shouting over the crashing rain.

‘Yes,’ he shouted back in agreement. ‘But we might as well water this yard while I am here.’

 

So he flooded the back garden and I returned to bed. My herbs are going to drown.

 

Some time today I must try to catch up on Nanowrimo — my word count is falling behind. I would prefer to start a new novel, or even to forget about the novel altogether. But I must persist.

 

My squeaky-poo puppies do not like the idea of widdling out in the rain. They dash out and in again like champion scooters, hop-hop-hop, scamper-scamper. Puddle mopping gets very tedious after the first 200 puddles. They whirl around in a frenzy of joy and inattentiveness most of the time and I keep calling them by the wrong names, so none of us are getting any discipline, learning to curb those love-bites or acquire the art of sitting still.

 

And being sober and sleepless means I am tired and a little ratty, but fully present to everything that is happening in my reality. I don’t feel a need to medicate moods or try to shift my consciousness or perk myself up in any way. This is who I am when I’m at home to myself: mild discomfort but functioning, and getting the work done. Earning a living.

 

Tonight there is a Taurus Full Moon and I shall miss seeing it because of the heavy rains and overcast skies. The bathroom has a large and morose rain spider lurking above the window sill. I am keeping the puppies away and sending harmonious energies toward the hairy beast. These spiders have a nervous temperament and weak jaws, so their bite is not to be feared, but they give sudden wild leaps and land on the unsuspecting bystander. The puppies would be fascinated and i  would lose my serenity for a brief space of time. Truce, my Arachne hirsutus, truce! That is dog Latin, not the real thing. Many elderly country people befriend spiders and frogs, leave out dead flies and crumbs for them, become very fond of intelligent insects and reptiles. I like that idea as a distantly removed concept.

Let me have another cup of coffee and get back to work. Then I shall have a hot bath and fall asleep listening to the music of rain falling on the corrugated-iron roof of the stoep.