“You know what wine and liquor tastes like. It makes no difference whether a hundred or a thousand bottles pass through your bladder - you are nothing more than a filter." Seneca, Moral Letters, 77.16
What do I feel when I look up at the sky?
I quit drinking on June 29, 2015. The moment I left my doctor's office I was alcohol free.
My bloodwork was horrible, the scariest result yet. My liver was kicking alcohol back into my bloodstream, explaining to me why I got that hangover feeling, even when drinking the smallest amount of booze.
Things got a little tense with my doctor when she suggested that I should quit drinking. Well. She used the phrase that I “should consider quitting drinking. Same thing. It wasn't her first attempt. I told her two things that late June morning: I am not quitting booze and I am not quitting cigars. I was emphatic: not happening. Emphasis on not. I have not had a drink, not once, since the night before my appointment with her, nine years ago this June.
Thank you, Dr. Stephanie Kehoe. That was her third swing at me, after two strikes, she hit it over the fence. I am the beneficiary of her persistence; and my contempt for who I was as a drinker keeps me on the wagon.
What did I see, before, when I looked up into the sky. Not much. Cogent thought about the universe is not a box a drunk or a hungover mind seeks to check. Making it through the day's work is much more pressing. Even when a drinker, this drinker, ponders the universe it is often in the context of me, myself and I . . . “what is my place in the universe; who am I; does the universe know me?”
Brief important and salient universal moments broke through, though. There is a scene in Alex Haley's Roots where the main protagonist, Kunta Kinte is born. His father takes his newborn son out into a field under a star filled African sky, holds the boy up to the heavens, and says, "Behold, the only thing greater than yourself."
My daughter Lauren was born just before midnight on April 1,1996. Once she was safely delivered, I went out onto the hospital's fire escape and looked up into the Aurora, Colorado night's sky and said those same words. I did not plan to, but the line from a twenty-year-old television show invaded my consciousness. I was barely able to blather the words out through my sobs, my emotions, it overwhelmed me. The birth of Lauren, and so too, my acute awareness of my separation from my daughter Dawn, impressed upon me that night that we are naked before the universe. Knowing that truth when I looked into the sky, fused my joy at Lauren's birth with my shame about my abandonment of my daughter Dawn into one experience.
Easy to chase those thoughts from your mind when you are a drinker. This drinker at least could. Quitting the sauce was the best 60th birthday present I gave to myself. Now when I look into the sky, I see a universe without "me" in it. A splendid timeless infinity that exists for its own inscrutable reason, devoid of the hubris that humanity ascribes to it, “. . . that which is greater than yourself?” It is very liberating.
