I’d finally become that guy you see walking around the neighborhood at odd hours wearing a fluorescent high-visibility vest. Sure it made sense as a safety measure but people in those vests always irked me, their look-at-me-I’m-so-responsible attitude, the way they walked with such pride and hoiti-toitiness. Rule followers. Like Homer Simpson’s annoying neighbor with his mustache and sweater, not my types. But this Christmas the family got me one so I wore it. Perfect for reflective walks.

Over at the mansions across the way, by the horse farms, they’d started taking down Christmas, dismantling the season to a few blinking snowflakes, the closest we’d probably get to snow this winter. Though it was dinnertime and dark it was so mild I could walk in my T-shirt, sweater tied around my waist.

Abstaining from my daily video game routine, some variant of Dry January, has left me feeling hapless between dinner and bedtime, a scant two-hour window I’d rather not fill binge-watching video or the news. Tonight I opted for a rare evening walk instead.

I’ve been reflecting on the absence of that video game, which I’ve played for about five years, and why I like it so much. If I’ve really quit or if I’ll start again. The damage to my hearing is the top reason I can’t play it anymore, the tinnitus. And I can’t play the game without sound because it’s just not the same. Maybe I’ve got this thing called process addiction, like when people get hooked on slot machines and the silly sounds they make. It feels like the same thing.

That’s funny because I’m a consultant who’s pretty good with process: helping spot gaps in business process, or to create process. But deep-down, part of me hates process and rails against it. My sponsor said alcoholics are like that, we like breaking the rules.

Maybe I could walk every day in the mornings and evenings and do yoga twice a day also, extend my meditation time. I’d climb Tiger Mountain on the weekends and when the days got longer I could go mid-week, too. I pictured my next annual physical and how proud I’d be telling the doctor about my healthy lifestyle. Sober five years. Multivitamins and fish oil. Yoga.

But it seemed like there was something missing. It’s what I always feared about going sober, this letting go of some imagined, other life. That other life was edgy and dangerous, unpredictable. A part of me still craved for that sense that anything could happen, that I didn’t know how my days would end. Now they were all the same.

I wanted yoga and meditation to help me transcend. The book I was reading (Buddhism and the Twelve Steps), was a mash-up of AA doctrine and eastern philosophy with a reflection for each day. Today’s was about surrendering and why it’s so hard for us to do that because we’re conditioned to think of surrender as a bad thing.

It reminded me of what my sponsor said, “The good news is the battle’s over. The bad news is, you lost.” That stung. But he was right. I had a problem with that whole premise of being powerless over the substance. I thought I’d exerted my own power by beating it. But the problem was my ego. I thought yoga could help me quiet that. I was probably wrong.

Outside it was so mild the frogs were singing and I watched our old dog squat on the lawn. None of them had any ego. Life just was. All you had to do was survive.

Categories: Addiction, Creative Nonfiction, Memoir

Tags: Creative Nonfiction, journal writing, Memoir, recovery, spirituality, yoga