Brave New Kitty

When I got sober, I was a devout atheist, an avid Ayn Rand fan and a reader of existential philosophy. At about four months sober, I went to a big, all night New Year’s Eve bash at a convention center downtown. There was live music and dancing, lots of food, party rooms, and dozens of round-the-clock meetings. I hadn’t given much thought to my spiritual life at this point, but I did know that I was going to have to figure some stuff out soon, because spirituality was a biiiig deal to all the people I knew who’d managed to put some sober time under their belts. While at this bash, I met a fellow who told me, in intricate detail, about his near death experience. I don’t know why he did this; I’d never seen him before and not seen him since. But he just came up to me and started talking. His story was so mesmerizing, and so shook my beliefs, I went to the library a few days later and began researching near death experiences.

Whether or not what this man told me was true is irrelevant. It was exactly what I needed to hear to start me down a path I needed to find. I had been in therapy for a while at that point, and had been working hard on my family-of-origin, shame, and self-esteem issues. I came into my 12 Step group with a lot of insight about those things. But about spirituality (by which I basically mean that which feeds my spirit, and the process of figuring it out-for me, it has nothing to do with a mythical beings), I was an ignorant babe; arrogant and opinionated, too. So I was very lucky to have had an experience that brought me ‘round to a new way of looking at things.

My point is this. Recovery is a complex thing, but it has two main facets: uncovering work and discovering work. Uncovering work is about facing your demons, and discovering work is about expanding your awareness (spirituality). In fact, I would go as far as to say that personal growth itself (which is really what recovery is) is comprised of these two main streams of development.

Digging deep, reaching high. Both are essential to growth and well being.

Neglecting either one will leave you incomplete. People who turn to religion to deal with their emotional pain tend to believe they’ve found The Answer to their problems and scoff at therapy. They tend to settle into a rigid system of externalized values that allows them to avoid looking at what caused their pain in the first place. Such rigidity and avoidance is not conducive to uninhibited growth, so these people don’t typically make it past a certain level unless they confront the system they’ve created for themselves. And this is true for all dogmatic practices, not just Christianity. Buddhists can fall into this, and 12 Steppers, too, as well as practitioners of dozens of other religions, denominations, and belief systems: if you’re using a practice to avoid dealing with emotional pain, the differences among them are merely superficial. (However, if you earnestly desire growth, if you are a seeker of truth, then most practices, including non-religious ones, can get you there.)

Conversely, people who turn to therapy to deal with their emotional pain tend to get caught up in the whole process of “working through their issues” and focus too much on the internal; on themselves. They can make great progress with their issues, and coming to terms with their family-of-origin issues, and stating their wants and needs decisively, and taking care of themselves, and the like. But without a spiritual aspect to this process, people tend to become more assertive narcissists and get stuck there. This makes sense; as anyone who’s had therapy knows, the therapist’s job in helping to fix your damaged parts is to iterate, in as many ways possible, how great you are, until you start to believe it yourself (and if she’s good, she’ll be able to provide rational arguments for each iteration). But if we take this too much to heart, without something in place to balance things out, self-absorption is a logical outcome. Much of the fun poked at therapy and many of the aspects of it that many people find distasteful are rooted in this fact, and I believe it is mostly warranted. And this is sad, because it’s sooo important to do this work if we want to become truly self-actualized people, or even to have a shot at it.

It’s so easy to neglect and ignore things that cause discomfort, and to fall into routines that seem to work, but are woefully incomplete if we take the time to really examine them. I was lucky to have had the experience I did so early in my sobriety, to have one of my major blind spots so gently and poignantly pointed out to me. It set me on an essential path that quickly (amazingly quickly, in fact) became second nature to me. My spiritual beliefs, that is, my understanding of what nourishes my spirit, have evolved over the years and look almost nothing like they did back then. (Although oddly enough, most of you would probably consider me an atheist.) They have become such an integral part of my life that it’s difficult to imagine I’m the same person who had such a negative attitude toward spirituality at one time.

None of this means that I’ve conquered all my blind spots or that I have everything figured out. Not by a long shot. But having this big picture perspective of uncovering and discovering allows me to step back and see recovery (growth!) as this constantly evolving, infinite process, a sort of upwardly moving spiral upon which I am sometimes conveyed and sometimes the conveyor, sometimes reaching up, sometimes digging down, sometimes uncertain and sometimes crystal clear, but all and always with a sense of moving forward.

You must do both. You must uncover your emotional blocks, and you must discover what nourishes your spirit and pursue it. These two processes must intertwine, build on each other, and become, in a sense, second nature, in such a way that you incorporate both into your daily routine and take neither one for granted. Whatever your belief systems are–and it truly doesn’t matter!– uncovering and discovering will take you where you want to be.

(Or: How to do Several Things at Once, All of Them Badly)

When I was a kid, I remember my father saying about one of my less introspective friends that “she’d go nuts if she had to be alone in a room for more than half an hour.” This was an ominous foretelling of what the post-industrial world has, in many ways, become. One way to look at that is to consider multitasking, doing several things at once in order to save time and increase efficiency. At work, multitasking may be an asset, as long as it doesn’t distract you from your most important tasks. But in the personal realm, multitasking is nothing but a way to miss out on your life. And assuming that most of the activities in your personal life are pleasurable, that’s very sad indeed.

I think our obsession with multitasking is a result of living in a society inundated with stimuli. Overstimulation is a real problem. Unless we consciously seek to shut it out, we are constantly bombarded with sensory stimuli. Television, radio, iPod, billboards, newspapers, email, the Internet, cell phones; you can’t even fill your gas tank, push a grocery cart, or use a public restroom without some sort of advertising assaulting your senses. We’ve gotten so used to all this stimuli that we can feel lost without it, and seek to create it in our own lives. Busy-ness for its own sake has become a shared cultural value for many. Thus it’s become a common perception that if we’re doing several things at once, stimulating ourselves in as many ways as possible, we’re being productive and useful.

This is, of course, a fallacy.

If we’re doing several things at once, it’s more likely that we’re doing all of them poorly, and not giving our full attention to any of them. Multitasking is kind of a chronic state of inattentiveness, and inattentiveness is a serious issue, because the stuff we’re not paying attention to is the substance of life. It’s easy to miss what’s going on in front of you and, more importantly, miss what’s going on inside of you.

We are beings, not doings. If you’re uncomfortable with simply being, you aren’t fully experiencing your life. Quiet time is necessary for introspection; introspection is necessary for awareness, authenticity, and growth. A steady diet of external stimuli causes us to miss out on all of this. There is more beauty and wisdom possible in one quiet moment of solitude than in a million moments of stimulus bombardment. This is because in that one quiet moment, a moment where you’re present with yourself, you have the opportunity to transform. In fact, this is largely what you’re distracting yourself from.

Why? Because it’s easier. Inattentiveness, distraction, focusing on minutia, or not focusing on much of anything at all, keeps us from exploring deeper questions and meanings in our lives. When we are introspective, we have to think about things we’d rather not think about: what makes us sad, what we haven’t accomplished, how we’d like our relationships to be better, god, mortality, etc.. It’s easy to avoid these things, and the distractions of modern life compound this easiness, but if we don’t take time to ponder them, then they remain unaddressed, and we make our way through life like a rudderless ship lost at sea, with no direction and no bearing, completely at mercy to the wind and weather. Easier, maybe, but infinitely less satisfying.

Have you ever seen someone out on a date answer her cell phone the instant it rings? I eavesdrop sometimes, out of curiosity, and sometimes, it’s an important call about business or children or a family emergency. But more often than not, an inane, pointless conversation ensues while the person’s dinner partner stares into space.

I used to marvel at this rudeness. I used to wonder why people would bring their cell phones everywhere with them: on walks, bike rides, picnics, dinners out, movies; why, I thought, would anyone want to be that accessible? After all, the phone is a tool for my convenience. I’m not supposed to become a slave to it. Then I realized that the cell phone has become one of the greatest multitasking tools ever created. Its power to distract from the present moment has no equal. While the cell phone didn’t create the problem, it has certainly exacerbated it. It is the ultimate tool of inattentiveness. It’s created this weird mindset that, even if we are enjoying what we’re doing, we feel compelled to stop doing it when the phone rings, especially if there are strangers around to observe. “See?” We say to them in our heads. “I am cool enough to get phone calls.” It’s almost as if it means that we’re taking part, that we’re an active member of society, or that it’s somehow a validation of our self-worth to receive a phone call.

It doesn’t mean any of these things, of course. All it means is that you’re unconcerned about being rude to the people you’re with or about being inattentive to what you’re in the middle of doing. Also, that you’ve bought into the idea that anyone who wants your attention must be more important than whatever you’re currently doing.

The deeper reason, though, that cell phones, along with all the other distractions of modern life, have the hold over us that they do is that we don’t want to be quiet with ourselves. Doing so almost certainly means facing some sort of unpleasant awareness, and who wants that? As long as we can keep busy and keep conversing, no matter how banal the tasks or conversations, we don’t have to look at ourselves. And that is the real appeal of multitasking. We get to see ourselves as productive and fulfilled even as we avoid dealing with the tough issues that will actually make us that way.

What a scam. But then, the best scams are the ones that allow us to believe what we want to believe, aren’t they?