Endigar 109
Have you discovered you are a child when you need to be an adult, and that you are old and cynical when you need to be a happy little child? There are things that I should have learned long ago. And there are things that I never should have forgotten. Life feels like a well crafted and cruel trick at times. I will change, because it is necessary for survival. I will do it in spite of the lack of inspiration, and thus, relevance to the dreams that scream they are real, but vanish in the practice of daily living.
This program, this life, often seems to be about surviving which requires the redefining of magic in discrete, but manageable portions. I have seen too many movies, embraced too many comic book icons. Life is either boring or tragic. You can’t bow to satan and wake up the next morning shooting lightning from your fingertips, nor can you bow to christ and walk on water. The real magic appears when someone reaches out and gives a damn about somebody else. I guess.
I’ve noticed many people seem to develop a survival mantra. My Mother used to say that she would tell herself, “If this doesn’t work, I can always kill myself tomorrow.” This apparently gave her the courage to try one more time. My slave said that she picked up this one from her workplace, “Put on your big girl panties and get to work.” The Army passed these jewels on to me, “Suck it and drive on,” “Adapt and overcome,” “if it ain’t raining, we ain’t training,” “The hard right over the easy wrong,” “One shot, one kill,” “no guts, no glory – no brain, no battle” “There is a fine line between hard and retard.”
There was one that I picked up from Brian Tracy in his self-improvement series, Master Strategies (I had to get it, it had the word Master in it): “Anything worth doing is worth doing wrong in the beginning.” He encourages you to push past the pain of learning new things, a pain caused by entering the arena as a child, ignorant but determined.
There is a story in the Old Testament scripture I really enjoy. It is the story of Joshua and Caleb. After 40 years of marching slaves around in the wilderness, waiting for the last of these professional victims to die off, they finally get to go in and carve out some turf. Caleb went after the Giants in the mountains, so he and his sons would always be known as giant killers. After all the blood shed that comes with announcing you are ready to build a society, Caleb dies. And I remember one phrase about him that resonated with me when I read it. “He lived until he died.”
I want that to be true about me. But many of those stories are ancient comic book icons. The god of the old testament and his followers would be held for crimes against humanity in today’s paradigm. Its a stretch to make them relevant.
When I picked up my one year chip, many told me that the second year of sobriety is harder than the first. Maybe that is because there is no longer the death dance with the obsession to drink or use. There is only the silent reality of “living life on life’s terms.”
I had an assignment back in 2006 to elaborate on what it meant to me to live life on life’s terms. I have added that to “I’m Rick, and I am an alcoholic” page. The reality expressed in that writing assignment was hard won. It seems helpful to consider now. Hopefully. I really need to pull myself out of this funk.
Daily Reprieve 
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