Considering what an abstract thing it is, it’s amazing what a central role the concept of time plays in recovery. Is there another sub-culture out there that puts so much emphasis upon such a slippery – indeed, totally un-graspable -- concept?
Not that alcoholics and addicts come to recovery ill-prepared to talk about time. In fact, all alcoholics are time philosophers to some degree, because it’s really impossible to be a drunk or addict and not to have meditated at least a little on what time is and what it means. And in particular, about that supremely mysterious and vexing time-related entity called…
the moment.
“Sometimes,” a reader of this blog wrote to me recently, “I help bring a meeting to a detox ward. One night I asked a group of about five people who were inpatients what they thought about the slogan One day at a Time. “’Are you kidding?’ groaned a 21-year-old girl who was due for her next dose of detox meds. ‘It’s one second at a time.’ Everyone nodded. They couldn’t get past the minute. It was excruciating. They were hanging on by their fingernails.”
The moment, I was informed at the first meeting I ever went to and just about every one thereafter, is the only possession I really and truly have. The past and the future are both not only abstractions, but toxic ones at that, and thinking about them too much would quickly send me back to the bottle. My job, then, was to set up shop squarely within the moment’s borders and never stray beyond it.
This was all well and good, sort of, except for one thing. This moment that was so all-important – that I was to spend the rest of my life happily ensconced in rather than pining for a half-remembered past or dreaming about or fearing a completely imaginary future – was defective. Especially in my early days of recovery, when I very much had that one-second-at-a-time feeling described above, the present moment struck me as a pretty poor possession indeed. I would look around the room and feel like I was down in that trash compactor that Luke, Princess Leia, Han Solo and Chewbacca get stuck inside in the original Star Wars. Here were all these people (me included), with all this waste and wreckage in their lives, and the only thing they had left was this narrow space of Right Now. And not only did this Right Now stink, not only was it full of garbage and muck and slime, but it was growing ever thinner, ever more claustrophobic by the second.
Any drinker or drug user can tell you that there are three basic kinds of moments. There are the moments when you’re sober, the moments when you’re drunk or high, and the moments when you’re hung-over or in withdrawal. And out of those three, only one is remotely worthwhile. The one that, if all went smoothly, I’d never be able to enjoy again. If the moment really was so great, and I really did have to make myself at home in it like all the literature so endlessly told me I did, why couldn’t I have one of those truly fantastic moments from my using days to live in, rather than this grim, gray, crummy, pain-filled one?
During my final year or so of using, I would spend a lot of time listening to a tape of T. S. Eliot reading his poem Four Quartets. From the very first lines ("Time present and time past are both perhaps present in time future, and time future contained in time past") the poem was all about one thing: time. Though his language and his ideas were difficult, and though I in fact didn't really understand most of it, I dimly sensed (and later came to see clearly) that Eliot was addressing the exact problem I faced as a practicing drunk and addict, and would continue to face as a recovering one.
The problem of the moment, and what to do with it.
In the years since, I've gone back to Eliot's poem time and again, and the more I do, the more I find in it that speaks to my condition as a recovering moment-manipulator: a person incapable of being satisfied with the present moment because of a memory of an infinitely better one that has now gone.
Time past and time future. According to Eliot's poem, it isn't completely accurate to say that these two things are really gone, and that I am left only with a present that is ultimately lacking. Instead, says Eliot, the past and the future are somehow CONTAINED in the present moment. All the joy and horror that I've lived through; all the best moments from the past, and all the greatest hopes I've ever had about the future: All are present, right here and right now, in this seemingly gray and anemic present moment that I feel so stuck in. The one happening right... now. "Time past," wrote Eliot, "and time future/What might have been and what has been/Point to one end, which is always present."
The more I thought about these words of Eliot's, sitting in my gray folding chair, the more I realized that my real problem with the moment wasn't that I was unhappy with it. Why shouldn't I be? Why shouldn't I pine for one of those infinitely better moments of days gone by, rather than the grim, gray one I seemed to be stuck in now? Instead, my problem was that I didn't understand, and couldn't experience, what that moment -- this one, right now -- really is.
When you really understand and experience the present, Eliot's poem explained to me, it changes its nature. It is no longer gray, weak, empty, and anemic, but something else entirely. But getting to that point -- that mental state where the present reveals itself as containing everything -- takes time. In fact, getting there can take all one's life. The good moments -- the great, timeless ones that everyone is given at some point in their lives -- don't last. But rather than feeling cheated by this, Eliot suggests, we should see this as a challenge. THE challenge, in fact. A challenge to discover how all the magic and wonder we ever experienced in life really is still present -- right here and right now -- even though it appears to be so completely and irreparably absent.
"We shall not cease from exploration," Eliot wrote in the famous last lines to the Four Quartets, "And the end of all our exploring/Will be to arrive where we started/And know the place for the first time."
Translation? This present moment may look crummy and lacking, but it really contains everything you could ever want. However, it may take you the rest of your life to figure out how to see that.
“When you get to the program,” that same reader quoted above continued, “people laugh at your frantic attempts to exit time. Everything in the program is about living in the moment instead of trying to buzz past it, looking for Nirvana. And Nirvana is right here, right now.”
Again, it's all right there in Eliot's poem.
Through the unknown, unremembered gate
When the last of earth left to discover
Is that which was the beginning;
At the source of the longest river
The voice of the hidden waterfall
And the children in the apple-tree
Not known, because not looked for
But heard, half-heard, in the stillness
Between two waves of the sea.
Quick now, here, now, always—
A condition of complete simplicity
(Costing not less than everything)
And all shall be well and
All manner of thing shall be well
When the tongues of flame are in-folded
Into the crowned knot of fire
And the fire and the rose are one.