Looking Back And Bowing

Most of my adult life and almost half of my whole life—from eighteen to thirty-five—had been intertwined with a university campus. There were the undergraduate years, followed by the years as a graduate student. Upon completion of graduate studies, I secured a postdoctoral appointment and, after three years, a humble professorship. And through those years and all the change that filled them, there were a few constants: drinking, reading, and writing.

The first shifted in shape. Sometimes, it was social and lubricating. Other times, it was a peaty accent to an occasion. Sometimes, it sparked creativity and gifted inspiration. At still other times, drinking fueled rage and succeeded in satisfying a non-conscious desire to escape into nothingness. My relationship with alcohol was, in a word, complicated and probably from those first drinks during my teenage years.

All of my studies focused on the liberal arts, which meant that I read a lot. At least, I read a lot initially, for the time I devoted to reading eventually needed to be shared with writing. “What goes in must come out,” you might say, and while that “out” can find expression in many forms, the written word—prose in the form of analytical, argumentative, or persuasive essays, specifically—is standard in the university setting.

So I read and wrote, and there was a balance. But balance gave way to concerns with reputation and status, felt pressures of competition with others and my past self—the latter conjured in whatever way offered the most critical perspective on the present—and an increasing demand from no one but everywhere to “professionalize.” In time, I read very little and wrote a lot—and I hated it.

“Publish or perish,” the anonymous they say. I would drink, and I would publish. I would drink to keep writing past the point of exhaustion in all its forms; I would drink to continue the pursuit of publications and the short but supposedly significant lines that publications added to the C.V. And eventually, I would perish. I would perish because drinking was no longer social; all it lubricated (in addition to the aforementioned) was my willingness for unsavory behaviors. No longer was there creativity or inspiration, either. I had drowned my capacity for the former and closed the latter’s channels. Rage ceased too, surprisingly, and in its place grew a now-conscious desire for escape. And escape is always available when liquor is in gas stations, supermarkets, and dedicated stores, whether government-run or privately owned, many dining establishments, and deliverable to your front door.

I ran—meaning, I drank to the point of disassociation—a lot. I would disappear for a week or two at a time, feigning illness. I would spend afternoons in a haze on my couch, dreaming of gathering a few belongings into my car with my cat and driving anywhere that was not here. I wanted to break free from the proverbial cell I had become trapped in and helped construct over seventeen years.

Sometimes I wonder why I never actually ran away from it all—aside from the frequent difficulty I had with standing, let alone walking. There is something, too, to the well-worn saying that, “Wherever you go, there you are.” I drank this way in California, Indiana, and Pennsylvania. I drank this way in South Africa, Greece, England, and France. Perhaps, somewhere in the transcontinental mess, I understood that no escape was possible. Whatever the case, I ran until I decided to stop and let everything fall apart. Then, finally, I was free—as well as fearful, exhausted, and humbled. It no longer felt necessary to run anymore. It no longer felt necessary to write, either.

I laid a foundation for long-term sobriety in the rooms of Alcoholics Anonymous. During that first year and first time through the Twelve Steps, my experience was broadly similar to any other recovering alcoholic. I attended meetings. I shared, introducing myself with the familiar, “My name is Michael, and I am an alcoholic.” I worked with a sponsor, which involved phone calls, text messages, and short and long in-person conversations. It involved writing and sharing a “searching and fearless moral inventory” and a willingness to amend relationships with those I harmed. There was laughter, too, as well as tears and frustration. The sponsorship—the friendship, really—was close, intimate even. I was told to “trust the process”—and I did. And 855 days later, I am still sober.

That first year was held in a firm yet adaptive structure. When it closed, some of that structure disappeared for various reasons. I will forego a list with accompanying details and say instead: life happened. An important part of that “happening” was my residency at a Buddhist temple, where I still live and serve and, starting at the end of July, will do so full-time. My responsibilities grew; they kept pace with the stitches sewn into the Okesa, Zagu, and Rakusu I prepared for Shukke Tokudo (Novice Priest Ordination) later that year. I did not quite “stink of Zen,” but there was a fair amount of fermentation.

I let a routine of in-person meetings fall to one side and regular check-ins with my sponsor fall to another. I had let reading the Big Book, the Twelve and Twelve, and the Daily Reflections hit the ground in front of me. In the rearview mirror, I saw half-baked plans for the second year of sobriety.

I had envisioned reading ways in which others had woven Buddhism and the Twelve Steps: Kevin Griffin’s One Breath at a Time and Darren Littlejohn’s The 12-Step Buddhist, for example. I thought that I might put their lessons into practice, too. There was a palpable need to bring these two parts of my life closer; neither was going away. And if one did, I feared the other would follow in haste. I would not let that happen to the extent that I could.

But I could not bring myself to read those or the other books that did what I needed to do. And, of course, I could not read them—I needed to investigate the connection (if any) between these two parts of my life, not read about others doing it. Enough had come in, and the time had come for it to flow out. Only one way felt appropriate: I needed to start writing again.

Photo by Jake Weirick on Unsplash

How did Buddhism, and Zen Buddhism in particular—flowing all the way from Eihei-ji and Dogen’s hand to the cities and forests of northern California and, eventually, to a secluded hut in central Pennsylvania—and the Twelve Steps fit together for me? Could they fit together, forming a more-or-less coherent whole? Or were there unresolvable tensions? In part to answer these and other questions, I started a Substack in late November of last year. I would write and I would publish, though in neither case was the process identical to that from my academic years.

I would not spend much time editing, revising, or rewriting. Copious footnotes had no place, nor did lengthy bibliographies. There was no need to “do the research,” either; locating a handful of articles in obscure foreign language journals and fumbling through them, the needed dictionary by my side, was a thing of the past. So, too, was incorporating comments from referees or submitting reports that dressed the sentiment “The referee is a complete buffoon. Please disregard.” in discipline-approved clothing.

Just listen and respond, listen and respond—and trust. Trust that what needed to appear would appear; trust that what needed to be said would be said. And somewhere in the flurry, I would find that for which I searched.

I did, by the way. Or that which needed to be found found me. I will return to this in another post.

I found other things, too. For instance, those tendencies nurtured over the years in seminar rooms and through silent study were still alive. I wrote with a focus on concepts, their relations, and their expression by way of language. (The last had grown in a new direction, by the way.) There were posts where I centered my attention on a single word or phrase, or explored the relation between that word or phrase and the spirit of Zen Buddhism, however that spirit found itself with me at that particular time. This way of engaging with my writing’s guiding questions offered a comfortable distance in two ways.

First, I feel most comfortable when I am not the center of attention. There is a difference between being the voice in which that which needs to be said is said, on the one hand, and being the subject matter, on the other. I prefer the former.

Stephen King’s perspective on what it is to write complements this preference. Insisting, first, that our lives are “plotless” and, second, that “plotting and the spontaneity of real creation aren’t compatible,” he continues:

It’s best that I be as clear about this as I can—I want you to understand that my basic belief about the making of stories is that they pretty much make themselves. The job of the writer is to give them a place to grow (and to transcribe them, of course).

Yes. Period.

Second, the comfortable distance afforded by the “philosopher’s stance,” as I will call it, provided enough space for my own life to find its place among whatever else occupied a page or filled a post. I am writing about my life, after all, predominately from the position of someone navigating that life after a handful of years of severe substance abuse. While I cannot be wholly absent from the stage, I can stand outside the star’s circle at its center and instruct the crew to not shine the big bright ones on me.

I mentioned a moment ago that my interest in expression-through-language had grown. I want to say a little more about this; please indulge me.

My doctoral dissertation centered on the relation between abstract objects and language in Plato’s dialogues, chiefly the Parmenides and the Sophist, though I spent non-insignificant amounts of time with the Republic and the Theaetetus, too. The whole project can be summed up without loss of nuance in this way: Abstract objects (as Plato conceives of them) are weird. Language is complicated. Here are several hundred pages in which I show this and more. Enjoy.

If it is fair to say that Plato thought the written word suspect because it is lifeless—meaning, it cannot “talk back” in the way a living, breathing interlocutor can—distance from six square inches of bark on a particular tree permitted me to see a forest filled with reasons for suspicion about language generally. Again, language is complicated. I felt with new frustration the inability of words to capture any experience well, even satisfactorily, such frustration born from an awareness of how fleeting life is (we cannot even say that “what flows flows white,” observes Socrates in the Theaetetus) and that I can express only how things appear to me, not to you, my cats, my partner, much less anything pretending to prized objectivity.

We can approach the matter in another way. If W. V. O. Quine had doubts about the possibility of preserving meaning when translating from one language to another, it is unsurprising that Donald Davidson would raise similar doubts about the ability of (native) speakers of the same language to preserve meaning in their communications with each other. “Radical Translation” birthed “Radical Interpretation” and a sensitivity to both encouraged in me a fondness for poetry coupled with a sense that the only avenue available, as a writer, required creating for you, the reader, as best I can the moment in which these words found their way down my arms, through my hands, and onto the page.

This is a long way of saying that I delighted in the tension of writing, how one might find delight in dancing with a free-spirited partner. It helps that now I am not a sloppy dancing partner because I can stand, I can walk, and the latter happens more and more at a leisurely pace because of the enduring yet continually-reborn insight that there is nowhere else to be other than right where I am, right now, with just enough wisdom to support caring for what is in front of me.

This offering is ostensibly about the relation between Buddhism and the Twelve Steps, though, so I had best say something about what I found there during the past seven months.

I found distance, both the presence of and the need for. The latter was a surprise.

The more I wrote, the more I saw that I needed to examine the relation because it did not feel close—not because I wanted it to be close, though sometimes it appeared that way. Indeed, tying together Buddhism and the Twelve Steps started to feel unnecessary at best of times and cumbersome at its worst. 

The distance became evident to me as I pushed through Steps Six, Seven, Eight, and Nine; I would mention the relevant Step, then shift my attention to a passage from Dogen Zenji and turn around once in a while to ensure I had not left the Step itself entirely behind. I wanted to leave it behind, though, as I continued to find enough in the Dharma to sustain and even grow in recovery. Call this the “unnecessary feeling.”

Sometimes, we celebrate cups flowing over. Over with what? Gratitude, perhaps. Lovingkindness and sympathetic joy are possibilities, too. Other times, however, cups flowing over just cause a mess.

Why was I continuing to blend two spiritual paths that did not need each other? Why did I move the metaphorical shovel from one hole to the other, thereby casting dirt and debris in all directions, instead of digging deeper into just one of them, whichever it was? 

Stop dividing your time and your attention. Pick one, and let the other go. Please. Enough is enough. Call this the “cumbersome feeling.” 

The answer is simple: that was what needed to happen then. As I wrote above, I needed to investigate the connection between these two parts of my life. And I found the connection forced, taxing, and requiring a change through separation. I needed to leave Twelve Step meetings, working with a sponsor, and the recommended literature where they had fallen—to each side and in front of me, the latter I stepped over some time ago.

Yet, I found gratitude for Alcoholics Anonymous as well. What the program offers has allowed me to enjoy long-term sobriety for the first time in my life. It helped to create space for friendships, to experience intimacy and support from a loving partner, and to step with both feet into a religious way of being with the world, grounded in service to others. It gifted me the desire to write again, too. For that, if nothing else, I am incredibly grateful.

Looking back, I smile. Looking back, I wave farewell. Looking back, happy and humbled, I bow.

If you benefitted from this offering, you might read the following:

The Moon And The Water

Showing Up For Your Life

Equanimity