Florida

I recently spent some time down in Florida where if the temperature falls below 75 degrees people start referring to the weather as "freezing." Even the pool at my mother-in-law's condo has procedures in place to roll a tarp out over the water when the temperature drops below 70.

Out of deference to my mother-in-law and the regulations of the condo, I resisted the urge to simply step over the fence, peel back the tarp and go for a few laps. Nevertheless, this situation did make me think about how important it is for people, myself included, to set up a scale of propriety, regardless of how silly it may seem to others. I did this in my drinking.

Former New York Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan used to talk about the practice of "defining deviancy down," wherein things that were once unacceptable are constantly redefined as "okay." For me, that's exactly how I operated. When I began drinking, there was a well-defined scale of "right and wrong." It's okay to drink in the evening, but not during the day. As soon as I started drinking during the day, I changed the rules to being okay to drink during the day but not in the morning. When that soon fell by the wayside, I devised other rules. Smoking pot is okay, but no cocaine. Cocaine is okay but no heroin. Heroin is okay, but just snorting. Etc., etc.

It seems as silly to me now as the temperature lock-down at my mother-in-law's pool, yet I needed the illusion at the time that I was still within the acceptable zone with my drinking and drug use. So long as I could point to something unacceptable outside myself, my behavior, no matter how destructive or hurtful, didn't register on the sliding moral scale I used to evaluate my misdeeds.

In sobriety, the scale has stopped sliding. I’ve come to understand what is right and what is wrong and don’t need to keep redefining what I know to fit the actuality of each situation. This doesn’t mean that my morals have hardened to the point of inflexibility, as I’ve been known to lift a few extra pencils from work or be less than entirely forthcoming on my taxes, yet on emotional issues I’m pretty clear. Unlike the process that accompanied my drinking, when I was constantly lowering my standards, in sobriety I’ve had to work hard in the other direction, striving more fully toward moral integrity and emotional balance.

I’ve always been drawn to the outlaw life. In fact, I thought I was living it when I was drinking. However, I’ve come to realize that I’m actually living it more fully now, in sobriety. And it doesn’t have anything to do with breaking the law. There’s a line in “Absolutely Sweet Marie,” a song by Bob Dylan, that says, “To live outside the law you must be honest.”

In my drinking, living outside the law meant doing whatever I wanted, whenever I wanted to. Today, in sobriety, living outside the law means something quite different – like living beyond other people expectations of me, of not getting caught up in what others think, but relying on my own intrinsic emotional gyroscope to keep me in emotional balance.

Every so often, on the subway on my way to work, dressed in my usual conservative garb, I’ll be sitting there minding my own business when a person will get on and sit directly across from me, a person, say, with a Mohawk or pink hair, or some other clear sign of rebellion, of outlaw status. And I can see, as they look at me, that I have fallen into that autonomic categorization of “old person,” “square,” or whatever other mental compartment they might have for people who look like me. As I sit, there’s a part of me that wants to connect with that overt rebellion, to show that I too, once lived on the edge. But, I know that nothing I can say or do in that moment will communicate the arc of my personal history from overt rebellion to inner outlaw, so I simply nod, smile, and look away.

When they closed down my mother-in-law’s pool, I went to the beach instead. It was actually a little chilly – far from freezing, though -- with the wind blowing up swirls of fine white beach sand and the azure waves pounding the shore unceasingly, leaving trails of white foam like shaving cream on the sand.

I sat for a while, hunched against the wind. An outlaw indeed.