Not Knowing Is the Best Part
How sobriety helped me embrace uncertainty
As Medium is want to do, it thrust on me a gorgeous little article on the more subtle changes that accompanied a mom/therapist/painter/writer’s sobriety. She articulated right there in the subtitle something that I’ve found myself appreciating more and more since I stopped drinking.
“…but inside, I’m evolving in ways I never expected.”
Drinking, the version of me who drank, was trudging on a hamster wheel that was both predictable and tedious. I felt jaded, like I’d seen all there was to see. I wasn’t terribly excited about the future beyond a good glass of wine. I wasn’t encouraged by the past beyond having a story to tell to friends or a therapist.
Life felt tiresome, underwhelming, vaguely disappointing. I relied increasingly on alcohol to give me the sparkle I longed for. And a slender flute of crémant would do the trick… for a minute. But the rest of my days were a big, long, weary sigh. I wasn’t enjoying my relationships or my work or being in my body. And that was honestly terrifying. Is this what life was supposed to feel like for the next 60 years? The people I spent a lot of my time with were in similar stalemates. It was less and less likely that my future would look any different than my present.
I’m lost in an Alan Watts book right now, The Wisdom of Insecurity. He talks about how, for most of human history, the experience preceded the description. Adam & Eve saw the animals before naming them. Our ancestors trekked to new climates and continents and worldviews. There was a very human flow of pure experience, pure presence, without a big story encumbered by categories and quantities and judgment.
Our society generally operates very differently from our literal and figurative ancestors. We rid ourselves of ambiguity and uncertainty obsessively. We name and diagnose everything. But as powerful as descriptions are, as satisfying as it is to find the right word, we have a tendency to cut ourselves off from “reality” while we focus on measuring, rationalizing and forecasting.
We experience the map instead of the territory.
We prevent ourselves from submerging in the actual newness of each moment, the subtly unpredictable nature of even the most repetitive cycles. We let autopilot steal away our lives.
“Jemma, it’s just fucking lunch/talking to my spouse/a Tuesday. What’s so special about it?”
When present, it’s absurdly profound. There’s magic in mundane moments just as much as extraordinary ones. And shifting our experience of the regular, the predictable, has an outsized impact on life as a whole. There are many more Tuesdays than Kendrick Lamar concerts.
The Thanksgiving weekend I first gave up alcohol, I had so many surprising discoveries about my life and myself, I felt like I had met me for the first time. But it wasn’t exactly a “new” me, there were uncanny traces of my adolescence blended with insights and kinks I’ve picked up along the way. In some ways I’m more grown up and accomplished than I ever thought I’d be, and in some ways I’m a bouncy twelve year old who likes neon everything. Underpinning the motley crew of collected traits was a spontaneously occurring experience of… life.
Such a dramatic lifestyle change, one that fostered presence, shocked me into a vulnerable curiosity, starting with myself. I began to approach each moment on its own terms. I started letting myself just be, and that practice overflowed into how I interacted with others. I was delighted to find they were often morphing and recreating themselves on this subtle plane just as much as I was.
I discovered that reality is rarely “this” or “that”. It’s both, neither and more. It’s a shifting, impossible to pin down enigma that is richer than all the words in the world. It is not something happening separate from us, although it feels like that sometimes. There’s no place to hide from life, it’s always there, popping up unexpectedly.
Art is distilling an element of these vignettes, communicating the ineffable. We can attempt to convey some of these stunning moments with more poignancy, more tenderness, more spirit. But even with a lifetime of practice, capturing the complexities of life is a process we never reach the end of, nor encompass the sum of. We are limited, though life is not. That is either tragic or the brilliant feature of humanity, depending on your outlook.
And more and more, I live in with the hunch that the spontaneous aspect of life, the uncertainty and the unknown and the great mystery of it all, is the best part. My alcohol use (and the insecurities it attempted to regulate) prevented me from diving into life with a trusting spirit.
Sure, there are dark times; we can’t keep the good moments forever. Heartbreaks and betrayals and loss are devastating. But when we’re facing our life free from expectation and preconceived notion, something magic occurs. It is both deeper and more beautiful than we could ever imagine, even in the depth of sorrow, because it is happening with a sensory richness that only the present moment can supply.
The sooner we recognize that any attempt to escape is an intolerable loss of our precious now, the sooner we find ease. We are freed from the futile task of clinging to a future. As the Buddhist saying goes (that I once nearly had tattooed on my arm), “abandon any hope of fruition”. This is not nihilistic despair though, it is a practice of being here now, it is faith. We lean into our lives enraptured by a not-quite-describable/not-quite-comprehensible presence. Words are inadequate, but it hardly matters because we are living it.
It’s not easy to let go of that desire to preconceive. We want to have some assurance that the future will be okay, that we won’t be caught off guard by anything, that the rug won’t come out from under us. But the truth is that all of our worst fears will happen, and at the same time, it won’t be how we anticipated it. Our fantasies will make us suffer. Our nightmares will help us grow and appreciate things we took for granted. If we can shake off the notions, we merge with the moment and fully inhabit our lives.
Every lunch, every conversation with those we “know”, and every damn Tuesday will evolve in ways we never expected, if we just have the audacity to let them.
