Just for Today (no emotional time travellers please)
This is the 12th post for ‘How to stop drinking: A guide for normal people’. A series in which I am sharing my reflections on living, and staying sober, in a fun, honest, down-to-earth way to show that an alcohol-free life is possible. Previous chapters can be found below on www.samwarren.net
One of AA’s mantras is that you only need to not pick up a drink today. You don’t need to worry about tomorrow. You don’t need to worry about Saturday night, Angela’s party next month, Christmas, or the rest of your life. You are just not having a drink today. Dear sweet Mary Mother of God, what nonsense!? When I was a drinker I use to think this was the most ridiculous idea – what the hell is the point of kidding yourself? If you believe you need to stop drinking (and I mean really be free of it) then of course it’s not ‘just for today’. Why pretend? Surely it’s better to come to terms with a sober life than play mind games?
Image credit: Chiltern & Thames Intergroup of Alcoholics Anonymous
Now I have stopped drinking, I can see how wrong I was. ‘Just for today’ doesn't mean kidding yourself that at the stroke of midnight everything will miraculously be OK again and you can crack open the bubbly to celebrate. ‘Just for today’ means
‘Worry about now. Right now. Just now and no further’
Not tea time, not even an hour from now. Concern yourself with this moment because this moment is all there actually is! The ‘Just for today’ card you’re given at your first AA meeting contains many excellent practices, but within them, there is one important idea that has stayed with me all these years. And that’s the practice of not loading yourself up now with the anxieties of some future state, so that you feel overwhelmed, plummet into the pit of despair and be far more likely to have a drink than if you stay in the present.
No-one can know the future, so our hopes and fears about what will (might!?) happen are just that – hopes and fears. So beaming them into the here and now, effectively making them real, is a huge source of anxiety which is completely avoidable, if you learn how. It’s an excellent trick to learn for all sorts of things in life actually, and is at the heart of all sorts of ancient ‘eastern’ inspired meditative practices. Shut down your nervous, chattering ‘future brain’ and stay in the present. Mind-full, body-full, and soul-fully right where you are. Because that’s all you have to deal with right now. As I write those words I am wrapping you in this super-soft velvet backed teddy-bear throw, because that’s how soothing ‘just for today’ feels.
In fact I might just join you in the blankie if that’s OK, as I’m in a pretty anxious place myself as I’m writing this – which is why I decided to tackle this particular chapter today. I have a Really Important Job Interview coming up in a few weeks (which is in itself a projection… take away the Really Important, and I might not be feeling so nervous), an uncertain application for a mortgage in progress, travel plans to finalise, a potential home-move to organise (oh my LORD I have to rent my apartment out?! I have no idea about such things!) and so on, and so on. And there will be a whole new set of things to replace these when I’m done getting through this lot. My son calls these matters for “Future Mum”, not “Now Mum”. I like that. It’s really helpful – it means I can pop them in a parcel and post them off to someone else*.
Now it’s one of the great joys of imagination and day dreams that we can conjure up future states at will, just by thinking about something or someone. But it’s also dangerous if we use it to imagine future strife or sorrow. Of course, there are tasks I need to do today in respect of things like job interviews, mortgage applications, and travel plans, and of course there are wider future issues that demand we think about, and act on them, now – like climate change – but the important point is that I don’t need to think (and therefore WORRY) about all of them, all at once, right now. Because as soon as I do, the emotions associated with the ‘worst things that could happen’, flood through my body as if they were already happening.
If drink has traditionally been your go-to support in times of stress, anxiety, or panic, then worrying about tomorrow just heaps on pressure to drink, feel crap about being sober, or hopeless that you’ll never stop craving, etc etc etc… so even if you don’t pick up a glass, you still end up miserable and wallowy. And as being sober seems extra shit under such conditions, you imagine bleaker futures, with more terrifying emotional ‘presidues’. This is my word for residual emotions from something imagined that you feel in the present moment.
Image credit: Complete Health News
Because emotions are chemicals that your mind makes real. To your brain (well, your endocrine system to be precise) your imagination is real. Seratonin and dopamine manifest to us as ‘happiness’, Cortisone becomes ‘stress’, Adrenalin converts to stress too, but also excitement. Yep, it's a bitch that one, even exciting things can stress you out – I still get all weird before a big night out like a five year old waiting for their birthday party to start. My friend Donna and I call it ‘pre-rave anxiety syndrome’. Finally, there’s the mother of them all – Oxytocin, which we experience as desire/ pleasure. This one is also a tad confusing: it is released during orgasm, breastfeeding and when stroking cats. But probably not all at the same time.
So remember folks, that all we really have is now, corny as it sounds. And if we can live ‘just for today’ it’s truly a gift that frees us from living in fear and worry of ‘what might be’. I guess that’s why it’s called ‘the present’.
*I wrote the original text for this piece in early 2018, and I can report from the future that all of those things worked out just fine, in fact better than I could have imagined.
My wife and I watched Chhichhore (Wikipedia) on Sunday at Fun Republic Cinemas, Andheri East, Mumbai. We thoroughly enjoyed the movie and I would personally give it an 8/10. IMDB says about the movie –
“Following a group of friends from university as they progress into middle-age life and go their own separate ways.”
This description falls far short of the movie and does it a gross injustice. It…
In front of her old home, Ms. Catherine Waiters is holding a yard broom that she made. When she lived here, her yard was swept daily. THIS CUSTOM WAS WIDELY PRACTICED IN WEST AFRICA and widely practiced by African Americans at Mars Bluff, South Carolina. The yard broom was made of tree branches, while the house broom on the left was made of broomstraw. (Photo: Amelia Wallace Vernon)
