Stupidity

I did something stupid today, or rather I realized that I did something stupid a couple of days ago. Without getting too specific, let's just say it involves not being careful about how I spend my money and how much I have to spend. Now, I'm going to have to admit to my wife the stupid thing I did, and figure out how to make up for it.

But none of that is the worst part. I'm most bothered by how it happened in the first place. I can say honestly and without any pride that I'm not, generally, a stupid person. I understand the importance of keeping track of money and other import possessions. I know how to add and subtract. I have all the intellectual skills I need to keep this and other bonehead mistakes I've made from happening.

Why, then, do they happen? Why do I do it?

Simply explained, I didn't take care. I didn't do what I knew how to do, what I knew I should do, and what would have prevented the mistake. Maybe I was in a hurry to do whatever else I was doing. Maybe it didn't seem important at the time. At some moment, though, I made a choice to act--or not to act--when I knew better.

I've seen these choices with others, people around me at home, at work, driving down the road. We make choices that we know have a decent chance of leading us into grief. Sometimes--often, even--we get lucky and nothing goes wrong. But often enough, we feel the sting of our stupidity and suffer the consequences. I would say it's like falling asleep at the switch, except that we're wide awake when we do it; I know I am.

Or am I? Does having my eyes open and my body moving mean I know what I'm doing? Does it mean I'm *conscious*?

I guess that's really what I'm talking about: consciousness. Awareness. Paying attention to the potential consequences of my choices while I'm in the act of making them rather than looking beyond those consequences to whatever sparkling trinket calls for my attention at the time: whatever new toy I want to buy or new movie I want to watch or tasty bit of food I must have or distraction I have to absorb to prevent me from feeling all those things at any given moment that I don't want to feel.

It could be that the first and most fundamental choice at any given moment is between awareness and distraction. Will I face myself as I am, with whatever unpleasantness that might entail, or will hide by burying my attention elsewhere? Lately for me, this question emerges most in my struggles with writing. I know that when I write I can't hide. I know that putting down words, no matter what I write about, will reveal what's going on inside me. All my fears and shortcomings will come out, either because I put them down or because I avoid them and then see the falseness in what I've written. I also know, and also avoid, what good might come out of me through writing. I know how much it frees me and makes me hopeful. But when I sit down with a blank page, I can't help thinking of the discomfort that it may take to get to that place of possibility. The fear rears up and I choose distraction instead of consciousness; I leave the page blank and find something else to do.

I'm not foolish enough to expect myself to be perfect, but I would like to be better. Instead of being aware, I now have to deal with the hangover from being oblivious. I feel like an idiot and that hurts. But if it wakes me up even a little bit, maybe it won't have been a complete loss. It woke me up enough to write this. Now the task is trying to stay that way.

Cold Morning

Winter has arrived at the desert, at least at night time. In the early mornings, such as now, I could almost think I'm back in Kansas. Almost. Usually I set my alarm for 5:30, but when the time comes, I turn off the ringer and lie awake with the covers pulled closer, occasionally drifting into sleep then jerking myself awake, afraid that I've overslept.

Then the sun finally climbs over the Rincon Mountains to the east, and the temperature creeps up--into the 70s today they say. I get up, wake my wife, and we begin the daily bustle, the circuit of food-work-tv-sleep again.

It seems, sometimes, that everything happens so slowly. It feels, sometimes, that on any given day, nothing will change, that in 10 years I will be in this same place with these same questions and concerns and insecurities. Or that new ones will have taken their place. As with the rounds we used to sing in elementary school where we each come in at different moments but sing the same lines over and over and over again, I feel as though I've heard the words before I even open my mouth.

But this morning, instead of staying in my warm bed, next to my wife, I climbed out, pulled on my robe. I moved around the house in the darkness so deep the air itself seemed to have a texture of grainy blue. I sat down here, as I've been meaning to do for months now, and started to write, even though I stared at the computer screen and checked the celebrity gossip and looked at the weather and browsed NBA scores for 45 minutes first.

Today, something changed. Maybe tomorrow, something will too. Maybe soon, it will begin to get warmer.

Circling Back

Saturday I went to my first Al Anon meeting in about three years. It came to me with a sharp clarity more than a week ago that I needed to go back, but I didn't know how it would feel. I wasn't sure what the sensations of stepping back into that skin would be.

For those who don't know, Al Anon is a Twelve Step program not for alcoholics but for friends and family of alcoholics--for those who have been affected by someone else's drinking. I suppose it might seem odd to some that people who *aren't* drinking would need their own program. For a long time, I didn't see the need myself. Of course, I recognized the difficulty of growing up in an alcoholic household, but I always figured that once I left home, I could put that past behind me. No alcoholic to deal with, no problem. It took me nearly 20 years to figure out it didn't work that way, at least not for me. Actually, it took me much less time to figure it out; it simply took me that long to decide to do something about it.

There are so many ways to think about how addiction works. Some people talk in terms of will power. Others consider addiction a moral failure, a sign of sin. For still others, it's about chemical imbalances and brain function or genetic predispositions. But my struggle with addiction has come down to facing relationships: of addict to substance, of addicts to other addicts, to family and friends, to themselves. For long stretches I've let myself pretend that this struggle came from other people not doing what they should do.

I know now that that's my addiction: trying to get people around me to do what I think they should so that I don't have to listen to the chaos and fear that constantly roar inside my head. The byproduct of my childhood spent living with an alcoholic is this scurrying anxiety just under the calm most people see. That's the deepest relationship at the root my wrestling with addiction. There is this stuff inside of me--or sometimes the feeling that there's nothing inside of me--which I have tried to relate to by ignoring it or by making everyone and everything "out there" in the world okay, orderly, pleasant and smiling. And when I can't put the world around me at ease, I become even more frightened because it makes the tumultuous world inside of me even more restless, more insistent.

I've known all this for years now; I learned it meeting by meeting during the five years I attended Al Anon regularly. But I had to be reminded of it, and that happened a few weeks ago during a dispute I kept having with my wife, trying to get her to deal with a problem in the way *I* thought she should deal with it. And when, in frustration and exasperation, I said I wouldn't bring it up again, that she'd have to deal with the issue herself, I experienced an unexpected relief and a realization that that's exactly what she *should* be doing, and that I should keep my mouth shut unless she asked for my help.

It was, in a way, like coming home--so familiar even though most of the faces were different. The meeting I used to attend had moved to another location, but I found it on a list at the Al Anon website. It was the stereotypical small church, multipurpose room with linoleum tile, low tables and chairs for children, and art projects on the walls. I recognized the expressions of fatigue, of anxiety, and also of relaxation and even happiness too. I recognized the chairs arranged in a circle with all of us facing one another, the brochures and literature spread out for people to take. Again, I joined the circle.