A Year in a Life

January 11, 2024January 11, 2024 / Tim / 6 Comments

It’s been a long time since my last post; April I think it was. It’s not that I haven’t had the time to write. I have been writing a lot, almost daily in a journal. And now I know that it’s time for me to start writing and sharing more blog posts.

This past year has been very full.

I moved back to Canada the first week of December, 2022. Leaving my home, friends, loves of the last ten years has been so challenging. Costa Rica is indescribably beautiful in so many ways. But I knew that I needed to continue with the next part of my journey back in Ontario. Moving back in December might not have been the easiest month to move back: I had to crawl out a window on the house on Christmas morning because both doors were completely blocked half way up by snow. I survived.

I started working a full-time job, in my brother’s company. It’s the first time since 1996 that I’ve worked full-time for someone else. The ol’ nine to five, though in my case it’s 7 to 3:30, with a pay cheque every Thursday. I’ve worked for myself and on contract jobs for so many years, doing so many things that it was very strange to have a job where I could go in, do my work and leave it completely until the next morning. But this has also given me the opportunity to do so many other things on evenings and weekend.

I was blessed to be able to spend a lot of quality, though somewhat challenging time with my mother during the last ten months of her life. In 2020 some severe medical issues forced her to completely give up her independence and move into a nursing home. While I was a long way away in Costa Rica, her plight was present to me, but certainly not in the way that I could appreciate how challenging this had been for her. She went from living in her own garden apartment where she moved easily between friends and activities, driving her own car, going to meetings, dances and casinos with friends, to being unable to do so many of the basic things in life. She could no longer walk nor stand. Her life was restricted to a very nice, but small room at the home, dependent on the staff for transfers from the bed to the commode, the tub to her wheelchair. It was a bitter pill to swallow. Hard for me to see; I can imagine but little what it was like for her. I’m grateful for the time I got to spend with her, two or three afternoons or evenings a week. When she passed at the end of September, she was more than ready to move on to whatever lies beyond.

The most important change in my life was getting more involved in AA. I’ve been sober since 2011. I worked the steps with a sponsor. I went to plenty of meetings. I always had a sponsor and I sponsored others. In Costa Rica I was involved in my local AA and I worked on the committee for our yearly convention. But for probably a year before I moved back to Canada, I noticed that things in my life were not as ‘happy, joyous and free’ as they had been. Back north, I started going to a lot of meetings, seeing many old friends in the program. And the thought came to me that perhaps I could use a refresher course through the steps again myself.

That has become the understatement of my year!

I asked a young man with just over a year of continuous sobriety to sponsor me and take me through the steps. I actually thought I would be doing this young man a favour by giving him the opportunity to sponsor me. I was completely unable to see the arrogance in my thinking.

This young man has taken me through the Big Book of Alcoholics Anonymous in a way I never knew existed. We would read paragraphs that I know I’ve read many before but would have to admit I really never ‘heard’ until that moment. Many times during our discussions, he would point out ideas and concepts that were completely foreign to me: me, the veteran AA member! I learned quickly that I needed to open my mind. The ‘Set Aside Prayer’ he asked me to write in the inside cover of my Big Book and which we prayed every time we met, was working in a way I could never have predicted. I was letting go of old ideas about what I thought I knew about the AA program and myself and was seeing greater truths.

I had no idea how much I needed what this young man has. And I’ve made sure he knows how grateful I am for the experience of continuing to work with him. The AA program I am following today is very different from the one I returned to Canada with. Not for lack of effort. I had a good man as a sponsor in Costa Rica. But I know I needed to come here to get the renewal in the program I needed. I can now see how close I was to taking another first drink.

With renewed guidance, I am working the AA program. I have a home group that knows I’m a member. I have group and now district responsibilities. I am privileged to be taking other members through the Big Book as my sponsor is taking me. And, most importantly, I have made a deeper connection to that Higher Power that I can now see has guided me to where I am today in my recovery. And for all of this, I am truly grateful.

I had no idea whatsoever what was ahead of me when my brother and sister-in-law picked me up at the airport that December evening. It’s been a year of great changes and challenges. And I have no idea what the next year might bring: I await with eagerness what lies ahead.

A New Pathway

September 29, 2020September 28, 2020 / Tim / 4 Comments

As a single footstep will not make a path on the earth, so a single thought will not make a pathway in the mind . To make a deep physical path, we walk again and again. To make a deep mental path, we must think over and over the kind of thoughts we wish to dominate our lives. ~Henry David Thoreau

Mental and spiritual changes that are real, that are deep and that are lasting cannot be accomplished by a single action. The ruts of my past pathways are carved deeply in my soul. How I felt about myself while growing up, how I relate to the people around me and how I connect with higher consciousness have all created hardened ways of approaching life. And just like it takes an effort to get the wheel of a cart out of the rut caused by years and years of running along the same path, making a change in how I think and act as a result of consistent ways of thinking for many years, requires great effort. Even after years of trying to remove my father’s too often repeated admonition directed at me that I was ‘as useless as tits on a boar’, I still feel its sting.

It comes at me during moments of my own weakness or when I feel like I am failing at something. It comes when I am in frustration because something is not going the way that I had intended it to go. My self esteem starts to waver, I remember that statement, and I fall further into my emotional state. I feel that I will never amount to much in life. I feel inferior to those around me. I doubt my abilities and my talents and my propensity for learning. I begin to believe that he was right, that I have no purpose in life. In my later teen years I rebelled against his frustrating cry by repelling anger with anger, telling him to fuck off and do it himself and leaving the scene. But the many repetitions of this statement by my father had already began to wear a deep rut indeed into my psyche. Alone and by myself I would use the same statement as self recrimination for an error or failure.

In the past years since I became aware of the impact of this statement on my life, now 25 years since my father’s death, I have battled with this statement. I have meditated on it. I’ve told myself that it isn’t true and listed my many accomplishments in life and challenges overcome. I have been in therapy, taken medication and symbolically thrown a rock with this statement written on it over the side of a cliff. And every once in a while, when I start to feel a bit down, it comes back to haunt me: ‘you’re as useless as tits on a boar’.

On an intellectual level I know that it isn’t true. I have disavowed the statement and I can enumerate many life accomplishments. And it is still there, lurking in a hidden nook of my brain waiting to jump out at an appropriate time to drag me back toward the abyss of depression and self loathing.

Lately I have been examining it more closely. I have started to look at it from my father’s point of view. Now for the most part, we had a good relationship. But it wasn’t always easy. I was his first born son and like any father, he probably had his own hopes and dreams for me and my successes in life. He probably thought about me taking over the family farm. He may have wondered who I might marry and what his grandchildren might be like. However, I also think that by the time I reached my teens, we were both coming to realize that I might be gay.

I have looked at my father’s own readiness to be a parent and realized that he had his own challenges while growing up. His father was 55 years old when dad was born. As soon as he could lift a shovel, I am sure he was helping his older brothers and father in planting and harvesting of crops, tending to and milking the cows and butchering chickens that provided Sunday dinners. His father was more like an aging patriarchal figure, or a grandfather than he was a dad. And of the stories I’ve heard, he had infirmities that prevented him from being much of an active member of the farm work force as he aged. My father, fairly quick at school, passed his high school entrance exam just after he turned 14; he left school without finishing the year and pretty much took over the farming duties from his ailing father as his older brothers were now working at jobs away from home. Seven years later, his father died.

Looking at this past, I can understand how his youth did not prepare him to become the father he might have become. He had plenty of anger issues and seem to relish letting go a stream of words that would make Red-Beard blush and let every neighbour within earshot to know that I had screwed up royally again. Anger was the only strong emotion I saw him express growing up. Fortunately, I remember little physical punishment; the verbal chastisement was enough. And, as he aged, he mellowed. He became a more pleasant person to be around. We never developed a deep relationship. We never discussed feelings or our past mistakes. We never talked about my relationship with my partner or anything touching upon sexuality. In the only ‘talk’ we had had about sex, just before the subject was presented back when I was in grade eight. He told me that as humans we didn’t go around the neighbourhood like a dog looking for a bitch in heat. Sexuality was not talked about. Feelings were not talked about. Within the family, anything to do with an even slightly taboo subject was mentioned in whispers as if the soft speak wouldn’t attract a fouler curse. Nevertheless, I appreciated what my father had done for me, his personal sacrifices for the good of his family. And could appreciate that he too was growing in understanding of himself. We both did the best we could in our relationship, given its challenges.

Photo by Juan Pablo Serrano Arenas on Pexels.com

I understand this all. I get that it was a different time. And I understand that he was doing the best that he could under the circumstances of his own upbringing and beliefs. I see that much of his anger was really misdirected frustration at his situation in life and his inability to express himself. It doesn’t make it easier for me when I am reliving the past, but it does make it forgivable. I have a better understanding of how he got to that point in his life. And I would like to believe that if I had arrived at the point in my life before he died that I needed to talk with him about it, he would have reacted well and listened to what I had to say. Unfortunately, that didn’t happen.

That doesn’t mean that this work I am doing on myself is finished. I still have to go back and fill in this and the other ruts of pain and hurt that were created early in life. I have to work on forgiving my father regularly. And I can work at changing my focus. I can focus on the good times that I had with him. I cherish the long hours I spent with him at the hospital as he lay dying; few words needed to be said then. And I will be forever grateful that I was able to spend his last night on this Earth at his bedside. With him, as a human, I have made my peace. With his words, it is still a struggle to overcome their power. But slowly, with constant work and the passage of time, I am moving beyond that perspective of my past and I am creating a new narrative of who I have become and who I will be tomorrow. Grass is growing again over the old pathway. Like an old scar, I can still see where the wound was inflicted if I squint a bit, but it is losing its hold upon me. I am working on digging in new thoughts to dominate my life, creating my own pathway in how I think about myself.

There is a Solution

May 19, 2020 / Tim / 2 Comments

I finished reading a short book last week called: Awareness: The Perils and Opportunities of Reality. It’s by a Jesuit priest, Anthony De Mello who died in 1987 at the age of 56. The book, published posthumously, is really a compilation of talks he gave at various retreats throughout North America and his native India. If you get a chance, it is worth a read. The chapters are short and concise, and full of incredible wisdom and insight.

One of the things he discusses is his belief that people are not looking for a cure for their illness or their problems. Rather, they are looking for relief. How often do I look for relief from the pain and discomfort of an illness? If I suffer from knee pain, I would rather take a Tylenol, because the cure, losing the extra 30 plus pounds I’m carrying, would be work in the form of exercise and diet. It’s easier to get relief in pill form than curing the problem. I am unhappy in my relationship, so I seek some sort of an outlet to make it more bearable because to find a solution implies a lot of effort. Relief is faster, easier to attain, and, most notable, does not require me to make the changes that the cure requires.

What if I hate the job I working at? What might the cure be? I could quit, discover my passion and work at it. But that would mean moving out of my comfort zone and living in uncertainty. So, I seek methods of relief. Maybe it’s recreational drugs or booze. Perhaps I go for high risk activities or adrenaline rushes. There are many routes to find relief and avoid the cure.

Finding a cure to my challenges means finding the root cause to my woes. And few people are willing to look that deep. It may mean some self-reflection. It may mean some outside assistance with a psychiatrist or other therapist. It may mean admitting to past mistakes in life choices. And for most of us, our Egos won’t allow us to go that deep. So, we stay stuck, looking for momentary relief rather than trying to cure our ills.

Finding a cure means making changes to our lives. Many people tell me that I live their ideal life. I tell them that they can do the same thing if they want it. But few are willing to make the changes in their lives necessary to live this life. Few are willing to take the risk. Living in Costa Rica does imply an incredibly special lifestyle that I love. But it also means that I live far from my family. It means adapting to a new culture and a new language. It’s not all butterflies and bananas all the time. We are all free to do whatever we want in life if we are willing to accept the consequences. The cost of the cure, of making life changes, is much higher than the cost of relief.

So many of us seek relief from the suffering rather than a cure from whatever ails us. We try to avoid the challenges in life by putting on blinders. It’s easier, often a faster but it offers only momentary relief, and then we must seek that relief once again. Over time, we begin to identify with our pain and make it part of our being. We forget that it there is a cure. And we forget that if we are willing to do what it takes, there is a solution.