melind4

We Are Addicts

If we buy the images and the stories of the culture of endless youth and are not mindful of the lies they tell us, we begin to fear that we will be discarded. Discarded and forgotten. If our fears of being discarded and forgotten are not acknowledged and embraced, the end result is all but predictable.

Addiction.

I think I’ve had enough of that and suspect that since you’re reading this, you have as well. I’m hardwired for the gross addictions: alcohol, sex, nicotine, narcotics, psychedelics, and amphetamines.

But we are a nation, a culture, of addicts. I am sure you realize by now that this book is for anyone who might think their life is out of balance, with the bar tilting toward darkness and despair and addiction. You don’t have to have drunk the Pacific Ocean or snorted most of Bolivia to be in that situation.

We’re addicts. If we aren’t addicted to drugs and alcohol, perhaps it’s to work or sex or service or, the most perni- cious, “self-improvement.” There it is, you see. The ultimate addiction is the addiction to the perfected self. My former Zen teacher once asked me, “What makes you so special? Show me anyone who is not addicted.” In many parts of the world, lazy is a word for a kind of somnolence, a mañana attitude that I find quite compel- ling. I’ve lived in the tropics, and the torpor was luscious. The heat stirred up creative energy. But, no, the mainland, twenty-first century, first-world laziness is of a different type.

Here is its most insipid and pernicious symptom: multi- tasking. What more effective way to avoid the truth than by becoming what Benjamin Hoff calls “Bisy Backson,” (a term taken from A. A. Milne’s Winnie the Pooh). Here he is. Do you recognize him?

Backson thinks of progress in terms of fighting and overcoming. One of his little idiosyncrasies, you might say. Of course real progress involves growing and developing, which involves changing inside, but that’s something the inflexible Backson is un- willing to do. (The Tao of Pooh)

In our so-called productive years, we rush out of bed in the morning, often awakened by “alarm” clocks. What an awful way to start the day, in a state of alarm! “Dammit, I’ve got to get going, the alarms are going off!”

Taking a shower, we wonder about having time to eat. Eating a packaged food product, packed with vitamins and minerals and, probably, fiber and EFAs—whatever those are—we wonder if there’s enough gas in the car so we can get to work “on time.” An hour into the day, and we’ve been alarmed, rushed, force-fed, and stuffed into a machine to get somewhere where we can produce something. Sounds like a feedlot to me. All that’s lacking is standing in our own waste products. (I did that a few times when I was drinking, and that was enough.)

It’s not over.

Throughout the day, we coddle the delusion of busyness and planning. In our days as employees we did so, and is it that different now? We live lives of constant distraction, most of it sought in our headlong flight from reality. There are millions of diversions, sought and unsought. The foot- ball game, the charity work, the volunteering, the civic du- ties dutifully performed. Are these somehow “wrong”? No, not in balance, but it is the lifelong lack of balance that be- comes infinitely grave as we grow older. And the social life. I go dancing every week and members of that community are becoming friends over time, in spite of their aggressive youth, in many cases. I bicycle, I study a martial art, and, being without regular employment, I can do all that and more on my own schedule and with greater flexibility. So how is this laziness?

Thich Nhat Hanh, another of my teachers, speaks of missing our appointment with life.

We all learned in schools that Socrates found that “the unexamined life is not worth living.”

In all our busyness, we never look in the mirror; we never see who we really are.

I spoke, earlier, of my dispiriting experience at a restau- rant, surrounded by old people who looked like they fed on the young. They do. They absorb the contaminated shadow of lifeblood with their toxins, their chemical peels, their face-lifts, their bloody beef and cool gin.

This is denial and excess to the point of living the life of a classical tragic clown, unable to dance, face frozen in a rictus mask, posing in the court of a dark king.

William Blake said that “the road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom.”

That statement has become a cliché and I, for one, used it to justify my behavior for many years. My excesses were all of the “material” type—partying, hitchhiking cross- country, drinking epically, being a wild man in a way that was really stupefying and practiced—a poseur, if you will. Such excess really needs to have an internal prod, a kind of existential rawness that summons dragons and tigers to roam the landscape, internal and external.

In our younger years, the excess can be compulsive sched- uling and working and consuming. We become the Hungry Ghost of Tibetan iconography (a creature with a vast body and a skinny neck who can never, ever get enough, even in such an abundant world as that which it inhabits).

Such excess, such endless longing and addiction, is an- other mask. Beneath it is the face of the lost one, life out of balance, who wants only to end its suffering.

I finally got to the real point of it, or so I thought. I quit drinking, gave up excessive ambition, and embarked— more consciously, but still lost—on what I saw as a spiritual path. Then the “excess” became a kind of spiritual and intellectual inquiry that was without boundaries or much discipline. This was a good thing, but I may have carried it on for too long. The road of excess does in fact lead to the palace of wisdom, but it’s useful to recognize the palace when you’ve gotten there and to step off the road. There, in a long moment of holistic awareness, the depth of the spiritual life is revealed. The spiritual life is said to be marked by chaos, then obedience, then skepticism, and, finally, integration into “the undifferentiated,” that is, the place of loving acceptance of reality or arrival at the palace, and seeing that it contains absolutely everything in its vast emptiness.

Most religious scholars seem to feel that, in this culture at least, we never get past the second stage, obedience, which explains the prevalence of fundamentalism.

I learn more from the existential awareness of Wendy and Henry and Jim and Chris and Naomi and Gracie and the whole mad crowd of people in my life than I will ever learn from some dead book. But the book, all the books, and the rules, all the rules, offer certainty and meaning in a world that, to the fearful mind, offers none.

What have I taken from all this?

First, read the books. They are important. And learn the rules. They are important. Then put the books and the rules away and live in the questions, right here and right now. Then, if you’ve really dropped the books and sensed the way things are, live in the Palace of Wisdom—a shelter where generosity and joy abound.

A place of balance.

William Alexander is a self-described “freelance storyteller” who has lead workshops at such venues as the Union Theological Seminary, the Esalen Institute, and the Hazelden Foundation. He has lived and traveled throughout the U.S., Bhutan, Indonesia, and Central America.

Alexander stopped drinking and using drugs in 1984 and has since been working to move from the addictive life, which he says is “always lived elsewhere” to a life “in the juicy center of what is”. He’s a longtime Zen student and practitioner and was confirmed in the Episcopal church in 1986. Alexander wrote Hi, I’m Bill and I’m Old when, after 23 years of sober living, he found himself “romancing the drink” in a reverie. He writes, “I saw, quickly enough, that the only way to move into a useful elder life was to completely re-vision my life, based in whatever wisdom and experience I had gained over all those years of living what I think of as ‘’radical sobriety.’”

Bill lives in rural Minnesota and is on the staff of the Hazelden Renewal Center. He is currently revising Cool Water, and is at work on his next book, tentatively titled Every Wrong Direction.