There's NOTHING Holy about Holidays!

Did you ever notice that all holidays seem to have something weird about them? You know the kind of weird that just ain't right? Let's face it, a bunny delivering chocolate bunnies (do you bite the head off first?), candy and EGGS!? A fat little elf plopping down chimneys in the middle of the night (or, if you're in Germany, sneaking around dumping candy in children's shoes in the middle of the night)? Ghosts, goblins and witches, not to mention adorable little things, collecting candy in pumpkins? Green Beer and shamrocks? A cherub in a diaper with a bow and arrow on the lose in the name of Love? Really! What makes sense about any of these so-called Holi-days. (Oh, just so I don't discriminate, do ya really PLAY with a dreidel?!?)

Now, let's get real. What is it that we most associate with Holidays?......That's it, FAMILY GATHERINGS! You now those, the collections of people that we may or may not try to avoid all year long only to dress up in our very best clothes to spend a blissful day with! Yes, those people! I once had a friend whose uncle described their extended family gathering as "a large collection of people who require massive amounts of alcohol, street drugs and medication to function with civility on three days a year without involving the police or firearms." While not all families are like that, the reality is that many are somewhere on THAT end of the spectrum.

Try as they may, families, especially those laced with addiction, are not famous for working with each other in large numbers for significant periods of time (like double-digit numbers of minutes!). Why we use the excuse of holidays for these episodes of torture, I'm not quite sure. the truth is in the Bumper Sticker:

There's NOTHING Holy about Holidays!

However, I do think there is a message in the perceived absurdity. It's for the children. If we didn't have these seemingly petty rituals and things with which to occupy the adults, the kids would have to sit around and watch the grown ups figure out how to interact with each other. Can you imagine if nothing happened after Christmas or Easter Dinner but the conversations between Grandma, Aunt Mimi, and Aunt Lulu? Or, what if the whole afternoon entertainment was left to those three, Uncle Bob, Gramps, and Cousin Charlie? You know who these people are. Can you imagine the fiasco, brawls, arguments or boredom that would ensue if those people or whomever they represent in your world were all that held the family's attention at family gatherings? What if that was all we had to look forward to?

Let's look at it this way: at least Easter dinner/lunch has the deadline of the egg hunt or the candy fest or the first kid to puke from the candy. At Christmas, either we have to get home before the elf gets stuck in the chimney or nobody slept on the Eve and the little ones are so cranky they WANT us to go home! yo can finish the list of so-called holi-days from there.

If we didn't have the innocence of children to keep us all from becoming familiocidal, holidays might be limited to well-policed public gatherings for mandatory rituals to avoid eternal damnation! Otherwise, it could just be too dangerous to get together.

The good news about healing and recovery is that my family is learning to tell each other that we've enjoyed about as much as we can stand of ourselves and that's OK. We love to be together and we love to plan the next gathering, in part, because it means that we're all going to our own castles where we make our own rules and have our own say-so. We don't have to wait until somebody leaves to talk about them because we have better things to do -- we talk about them to their face and enjoy the laugh. If we're mad about something, we save that for after the gathering and really have it out one-on-one until the problem is solved as much as loved ones can solve problems. Then, unless it will throw the Earth off its axis, we let it go (well, most of the time). The purpose of gatherings is to enjoy each other, cook together, eat, entertain the children, do the silly rituals we all love and laugh. Isn't that far more holy? Then, again, we don't do that only on Hallmark days. We do it whenever we want and for whatever reason we want. We may change the menu for Holidays, based on what the commercials say, and the recreation may change, but our gatherings .....they are all about the same. I like it that way. Come to think of it, the Bumper Sticker is right...

There's NOTHING Holy about Holidays!!

PS - There is no Gravity -- Life just sucks!

Now, that doesn't sound like a very good start for the first blogging in 3 months, but please bear with me, it really might not turn out that way! Just for the record, in the last 2 months, I've been through preparing for Board Re-Certification, Winter, Mardi Gras in my hometown, Studying for the first time in 10 years, a 7 day whirlwind tour of marketing and education through the northeast, along with my first stroll down Broadway (BTW, you MUST see "Wicked: The Musical") the birth of my 5th grandchild and life in general. So, if I'm remiss and behind, to quote Steve Martin on SNL, "EXCUUUUUUUUUUUSE me!"

This week, I appeared on Facebook at the urging of several colleagues and family members. To my pleasure and surprise, I heard from many, many friends and a couple of very old special memories. One in particular taught me a new lesson: The definition of serenity. I got a hit on Facebook from a name I recommended. Let's call him Matt, for convenience. I recognized the name immediately, since his last name was NOT a typical Cajun name and one that stood out. What jarred my memory even more was the memory of a very gentle, kind giant of a man who came into treatment hurting and longing for some way of stopping the pain. He took everything his counselors and the rest of the treatment team had to heart and ran with it. I look back and think that this was just 3 years into my career in Addiction Medicine and less than 5 years in my own journey in healing. If I had been my supervisor today, I probably would have told one of my peers after a supervision session that I still had not a clue what I was doing, I was just trying to stay between the guardrails! Anyway, once I acknowledged Matt on Facebook, he filled me in on the last 19.98 years. Yes, almost 20 years. He talked of how grateful he was and how much he appreciated the meetings he'd been directed to and the wisdom he'd been given and all that jazz. He mentioned the peace he'd found, many of the losses he had and how much he knew he still had to work on his Recovery every time he turned around. He mentioned the gifts of the Program and Dr. Bob and Bill W. and all those who had guided him along the way. He spoke with deep gratefulness of how supportive his family was and how, when all else failed, his Beagles listened and never thought about using, drinking or acting out in any way! He seemed to laugh at some of the irony of my "ranch" in Texas and how I had a herd of struggling addicts to move along, admonishing them to pay attention. Then, he did the most amazing thing. Without knowing it, he plastered a bumper sticker right there on the page:

PS -- There is no Gravity -- Life Just Sucks! (and it's all Good!)

Acutally, here's his quote (with some confidentiality modifications!): "Oh, and a post script: [My medicall illness] has attacked ...and moved me up to a Stage 6. I'm on the Transplant list @ ... Low platelet count prevents me from [the next level of medical treatment], but other things are coming along. Can't dwell on it, life goes on. Besides, I got a bonus of 20 years that I would have had (let alone, remember)! It's all good." My only thought was, "Holy Crap! He just gave me all this wonderful stuff and put the 'reality' in the PS!"

As I reflected, I've seen this before. In particular, I think of a man I'll call Buck. He wrote from a county prison where he was being warehoused. He told me of how he was taking advantage of the time to read, write, take long walks around a gym track, listen to music on his CD player, and visit the library in the County Jail. He spoke of how reading the "Classics" had helped him with his loneliness and how sharing the Big Book of AA with others had helped keep him grounded in staying sober in spirit. He included articles about the brain he'd copied from Time Magazine. He went on for 3 pages before he wrote something like this: "Oh, yeah, they've had to increase the Vitamin C to 10,ooo mg a day to counter the chemotherapy. My colon cancer was Stage IV, but they think they were able to get it all. I have to wait another two weeks before they can start the radiation treatment. Once that is done, I can go back to the Prison." He went back to some more statements of gratitude and encouragement for those of us who were still working with those who were "in denial."

These kind of things remind me that peace comes from deep within. Both of these men reminded me that they had something I forget to seek many days. They did not look for what was painful, lacking or in short supply in their lives. Heaven knows they had enough to worry, complain, or fret about. However, something in their spiritual anchor allowed them to move that to the Post Script and to be clear that they were focused on what was true about themselves, about life and about Recovery. If you read the body of their letters, you heard about a life that was full, content and wonderful. In both cases (as with other times I've been given this kind of gift), I smiled as I was moved to tears of gratitude. In both cases, no, in all cases, I am stunned when the reality of their lives hits me, taking my breath away. I am left in awe, not particularly because they deal with life threatening illnesses, but because they face life threatening illnesses in the post-script!

That is the harsh reality - Life sucks. I can't minimize that. One of the lessons they did NOT teach me in medical school was that every single one of my patients will eventually die. With any luck, very few will be on my watch! With really good luck, most will outlive me, since I treat a population that is, by and large, much younger than I am! Regardless, every single human being will expire, transition, or go kaput! Every single day, each and every one of us will face some sort of disappointment! With luck, it will be that Starbucks is out of Carmel Cinnamon Dulce Fat-free Sugar-Free Peroxide-Free Three Squirt for our Venti Triple Soy Extra Hot Latte!!! On most days, it will be far more than that. On some days, the disappointment will feel too much to bear and the next day will be worse. THAT SUCKS! I can't change that. If I'm really, really lucky, though, I can be in a serene enough place to surrender to the trust that this Universe is loving, creating and generous enough to guide me through it to the other side. I can hold on to the notion that it is the fact of the frost that MAKES the peaches make fruit, but only if there are at least 29 days of frost every winter. I don't have to try to feel peachy warm when I'm at risk of frostbite. I just have to stay warm, get out of the cold when I can and remember that Spring will come, if I don't march northward!

Woody Allen said some variation of this: "Life is full of misery, loneliness, and suffering - and it's all over much too soon." I think there's some wisdom here. It's just the truth. Life has all those things. We can choose to focus on them, or we can see the sunrise, hear the laughter, find the joy and notice that some sucky force keeps our feet on the ground and allows us not to float aimlessly into the ethers!


PS -- There is no Gravity -- Life Just Sucks! (and it's all Good!)