Addiction and surrender

I’ve been distracted lately…busily living my life….just letting thoughts drift in and out… waiting to be enticed by some compelling new insight that will draw me to the keyboard.

It seems that while I’m waiting, living happens. I find myself in another city, traveling with a very dear friend whose family member is struggling with ‘addiction’. We journey together to be there, trusting that doing so will in some small way quiet the fear – and the shaking and sweating and the nausea and the agitation that go with it.

We arrive late afternoon and talk, long into the night. I ponder the next day’s departure for a 21-day stay at a rehab centre, knowing in my heart that were we to have just three days together, none of it would be necessary. It is not about addiction – it’s about having to learn, all over again, what it is to be ourselves; what it is to know and live from the truth of our experience; and what it is to be willing to have who we are be enough.

I know 12-step. I spent years in 12-step programs. It’s not that going to the rehab centre with a 12-step approach is a bad thing – it’s not enough. Long ago, I wrote an article on my view of addiction, having lived it and learned so profoundly from it. I hold myself as one of the lucky ones: I discovered something else.

This brings me to the ‘god’ part - the part that presses the hardest to take a front row seat in the theatre of my attention.

We talk into the small hours and finally consider sleep as a possibility. Restlessness and the impending departure for rehab ensure that sleep does not come easily, no matter how deeply fatigued the body is. After a couple of hours, it’s time to get up and make our way through the dark, in the freezing rain and along the treacherous roads to our destination.

I sit in the back seat, listening to the conversation in the front. I feel tears and a heave in my chest as I think of this incredible godforce – oblivious to its own presence – about to be told to once more surrender. Surrender to a higher power. Surrender to the 12-steps. Surrender…to whatever it is that was thought to be the answer to this problem. I think to myself: how strange and sad that we are never encouraged to surrender to the truth of our own experience and allow IT to guide us.

And so, there sits another incredible godforce… in rehab… learning yet one more time how to NOT be the truth of his experience but to surrender the truth of that experience to yet another externally imposed framework.

In this moment, in the writing of it, it makes me weep. Yet another swan that thinks it’s just an ugly duck. Hope lies in the first day after the 21.

Breathing is good…..