Corking the Bottle

Running long distances was my passion. I ran races anywhere from 6.2 miles to 50 miles. Compared to other runners I was okay, but certainly not a standout. What mattered was competing against myself by reducing my time. The bottom line was keeping fit and healthy and, unlike my father, living to be older than 49. I was maybe in my prime when my knee started bothering me. I ran through it. Don't let a little bit of pain slow me down, I thought. Rub some dirt on it and sign up for another race. Ignore the problem and it will go away. It didn't work out that way. I eventually had to see a doctor. After arthroscopic surgery and a long recovery, I went back to running. My knee still hurt and kept getting worse. I ignored the problem. It still didn't go away. "Problems do not go away. They must be worked through or else they remain, forever a barrier to the growth and development of the spirit," wrote M. Scott Peck in The Road Less Traveled ( http://www.mscot...

When it comes to drinking, some people never quit until abstinence comes to them in the grave. Yet God sends us all a healthy way out. He gives us a chance. Nevertheless, "... many are called but, few are chosen." (Matthew 22:14) Why are few chosen? What does that mean? M. Scott Peck in The Road Less Traveled offers this explanation: "As is common with grace, most reject this gift and do not heed the message. They do this in a variety of ways, all of which represent an attempt to avoid the responsibility for their illness." God gave me chance after chance to give up drinking, but I always came up with an excuse to relapse. The A.A. Big Book, in a personal testimony on page 293, observes, "I didn't want to drink that day but I took no action to insure against it. You see, I believe that we get more than one 'moment of grace' from God -- but it is up to us to seize the moment by taking action." Dr. Peck wrote that some, including most...

We've all done it. I'm not senile. I couldn't find my keys the other day. I looked throughout the house. I looked in the car. I was convinced someone must have taken them. Then I heard a jingling in my pocket. The keys were with me all along. We tend to look for God the same way. We think He is in church. We think He is in nature. We think he is in heaven or up in the clouds someplace. He is in all those places, for sure. But to find God, look no further than your own pocket. Discovering The Road Less Traveled by M. Scott Peck ( http://www.mscottpeck.com/ ) was like discovering gold in the ditch behind my house. In this book is a wealth of knowledge about myself, my alcoholism, and God. For the God part of this wisdom, Dr. Peck tells us to turn inward to find God: "He is part of us. If you want to know the closest place to look for grace, it is within yourself.... What this suggests is that the interface between God and man is at least part of the interface ...

Thank God for the power to stop drinking. No, really, literally: Thank God! I pulled together some passages today from two books that mean a lot to me: The Road Less Traveled by M. Scott Peck ( http://www.mscottpeck.com/ ), and the Big Book by the pioneers of Alcoholics Anonymous ( https://www.aa.org/pages/en_US/alcoholics-anonymous ). These quotes refer to the utmost ingredient essential to our growth and maturity, whether we are alcoholics or not. I refer to the deity many of us call God. I want to start with Dr. Peck: "In debating the wisdom of a proposed course of action [like quitting drinking], human beings routinely fail to obtain  God's side of the issue. They fail to consult or listen to the God within them, the knowledge of rightness which inherently resides within the minds of all mankind.... If we seriously listen to this 'God within us' -- we usually find ourselves being urged to take the more difficult path, the path of more effort rather than less...

"Life is difficult. This is a great truth.... "Most do not fully see this truth that life is difficult. Instead they moan more or less incessantly, noisily or subtly, about the enormity of their problems, their burdens, and their difficulties as if life were generally easy, as if life should be easy." -- M. Scott Peck, The Road Less Traveled ,  http://www.mscottpeck.com/ But life "is a series of problems." We each deal with life in our own way. Some of us turn to alcohol and drugs, which is what this blog is all about. Pain, I heard recently at an A.A. meeting, is necessary; suffering is optional. I chose to suffer after a series of unanticipated "tragedies" left me depressed. I had never had so much turn so rotten so quickly in my life and so had never experienced depression. The only fix that seemed to work was alcohol. Ironically, alcohol itself is a depressant. But if I drank enough, the earth stopped turning for a little while until I re...

To give up our addicted ways requires a close relationship with a higher power. If I could think of a stronger word than "close" I would use it. "Intimate" maybe? When that bond is formed it is life-changing. If you have experienced such a rebirth, you know what I mean. I sometimes quote The Road Less Traveled by M. Scott Peck.( https://www.seeken.org/the-road-less-traveled-summary/ ) Here is his view of rebirth, the kind we feel when we find God and stop drinking (pages 250-251): "We are always either less or more competent than we believe ourselves to be. The unconscious, however, knows who we really are. A major and essential task in the process of one's spiritual development is the continuous work of bringing one's conscious self-concept into progressively greater congruence with reality. When a large part of this lifelong task is accomplished with relative rapidity, as it may be through intensive psychotherapy, the individual will feel 're...

I remember these sappy comics running in my local paper as I was growing up. To an adolescent boy, anyway, they were sappy. My parents loved me, and I loved them. But Love with a capital L with a girl with a capital G? That seemed far away. As I am learning as an adult, that wasn't really love at all. Foreigner: "In my life there's been heartache and pain I don't know if I can face it again Can't stop now, I've traveled so far, to change this lonely life "I want to know what love is I want you to show me I want to feel what love is I know you can show me...." http://www.songlyrics.com/foreigner-feat-nate-ruess/i-want-to-know-what-love-is-lyrics/ Alcoholism. "What's love got to do with it?" Tina Turner sang. Plenty. You can't give what you don't have. Scott Peck, in The Road Less Traveled , claims, "Love is not a feeling...Love is an action, an activity." ( http://www.mscottpeck.com/ ) Dr. Peck goes on ...

Life hurts, Sorry to break that to you, but it's the truth. Sometimes a Band-aide will do. Other times we need a complete shift in our view of reality. Solving problems is how God teaches us to grow spiritually. M. Scott Peck in The Road Less Traveled ( https://www.thriftbooks.com/a/m-scott-peck/199678/ )   has it right, I think. Consider this, as you think back to what made you start and continue drinking: “Many aspects of the reality of the world and of our relationship to the world are painful to us. We can understand them only through effort and suffering. All of us, to a greater or lesser extent, attempt to avoid this effort and suffering. We ignore painful aspects of reality by thrusting certain unpleasant facts out of our awareness. In other words, we attempt to defend our consciousness, our awareness, against reality. We do this by a variety of means which psychiatrists call defense mechanisms.” One defense mechanism is drinking or drugging. That’s how...

I just started reading The Road Less Traveled . I read it years ago, but because the cover calls it "The Timeless Classic," I gave myself permission to read it again, especially since it was the old struggling me and not the new joyful me that read it before. The author is the late M. Scott Peck. Here is a short video that summarizes some lessons from the book.  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h_cuVMC7NcI In the introduction, Dr. Peck tells how slowly the first printing of his book filled shelves. Eventually, word of mouth popularized it via different routes. "One of them was Alcoholics Anonymous. Indeed, the very first fan letter I received began, 'Dear Dr. Peck, you must be an alcoholic!' The writer found it difficult to imagine that I could have written such a book without having been a long-term member of A.A. and humbled by alcoholism." I'm just a few pages into the first chapter but I like the following advice. He tells of a woman who hated her...