Step Three: Part One

Made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God as we understood him

On this final week of 2023, we turn to Step Three. It seems fitting, as this is a time of the year when resolutions are made. We’ll eat healthier, meaning we’ll eat more things that are green and fewer things that are the colors of Oreos. Or we’ll exercise more, read more, spend less time interacting with screens—the possibilities are literally infinite. For the moment, though, less important is any resolution’s particular content; more important is what it is to resolve to do something, independent of what that something is. When we make a resolution, we make a decision—and if we’re in accord with the New Oxford American Dictionary, it is a firm decision, not a defeated shrug of the shoulders.

Step Three reads:

Made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God as we understood him.

We admitted to living in an unmanageable way. Then we came to believe that a different way was possible for us. There follows a decision to bring that different way of living into being—from mere potentiality to actuality. The final dictionary entry for resolution reads, “the conversion of something abstract into another form.” I want to strike-out the words another form and above them write something concrete. I want to give substance to the initial entry’s use of the word firm. Otherwise, it feels hollow. For how can I tell if my decision is a firm decision? What does that even mean? Or, more important to me these days: What does it feel like?

One response assumes as its starting point that something firm or concrete offers resistance. Often we think of resistance as physical or tangible. The embrace of a fellow friend in recovery, your sponsor, or a spiritual teacher as you share the day’s difficulties and the now-present thoughts of escaping in a familiar and destructive way. Previously that desire to escape was overwhelming, all-consuming, and you all too easily found yourself three-quarters of the way through a bottle of whiskey … again. It was just too difficult to be present with those feelings of discomfort and pain and, as Thich Nhat Hanh would say, “take good care of them.” Yet in the arms of your friend—arms present because of actions taken following your decision—there is resistance. Resistance that anchors you right here, in the midst of what is unpleasant. Resistance that tells you in no uncertain terms that you are not alone. That you need not bear the day’s difficulties only on your own shoulders. That others are here too; they can help carry the load if it’s too much—and even if it’s not.

Another response turns the whole matter on its head, so to speak. Here resistance is found in the absence of something firm or concrete—and is no less powerful than its physical counterpart.

I heard often in early recovery about how heavy the phone becomes when you need to call someone for help. Suddenly that device that you carry constantly, effortlessly, as though it were any other appendage of this skin bag, weighs five hundred pounds! “I can’t lift it! It’s just too heavy!” Most of the time these excuses are about as plausible as, “I couldn’t find my phone” or “my phone was dead.” I can’t tell you the last time my phone’s battery dipped below a forty-percent charge. I do, however, remember well that morning when I called for an ambulance because of severe withdrawal symptoms. It took me three hours to make that phone call—three hours of just sitting there, staring at my phone, understanding enough the danger of my present situation and yet stilled by fear.

What changed? Sometimes in challenging situations we—or I, we’ll narrow the scope here—have heard the words, “Man Up!” The imperative carries an unsaid yet understood directive to push. Push through the difficulty. Push through the pain. Push through the fear. The act of “pushing through” suggests the intention to create an opening where there isn’t one. Namely, in that through which one has been directed to push. It looks outward, necessarily. I’m not sure that this sort of pushing is ever effective, really—and not simply because I consistently find myself without Ajax’s eight-layered shield to aid me. I’m also not sure that I’m not sure. My doubt concerns less the course of action’s efficacy and more the resulting harm from two firm and concrete forces locked in tension with each other, the strain that accompanies each attempt to move forward or at least not lose ground.

Photo by Jaime Spaniol on Unsplash

The more time you spend in recovery or studying the Dharma, the more you learn that it’s not things outside of you that need change but your relationship to them. What changed that September morning, allowing me to lift the now and always six-ounce phone, was that I stopped resisting. I stopped trying to be firm or concrete. I stopped trying to keep on the outside something that needed, not so much to come inside, but to pass through me. One more sign that my life was continuing in a downward direction with great speed. One more sign that I needed help.

Above I asked: What does a firm decision feel like? And what I am suggesting is that, rather than a feeling of resistance born from something concrete, it feels porous. There is constancy of purpose but it’s not sustained by way of brute force or sheer willpower. It’s sustained by their absence. That continual willingness to just keep going has as its buttress an attitude of acceptance or, as you hear so often in the rooms, “learning to live life on life’s terms.”  Or, if you spend enough time around me, the admonishment to get out of your own way. As Dogen Zenji observes in the Genjo Koan:

To carry the self forward and illuminate myriad things is delusion. That myriad things come forth and illuminate the self is awakening.

Rarely does this sort of transformation in our orientation to the world happen overnight. There are those for whom the making of a decision is punctuated by a thunderbolt. For more of us, however, it comes through consistent practice; “recovery belongs to the steady plodder, Michael,” my first sponsor would often say. And, lest I forget, this transformation brings with it its own form of resistance—we resist becoming stuck.