Though the winter got started late this year here in New York, it’s now been extra-cold for what feels to me like an extra-long time. For weeks now, temperatures have largely been so low that each time I step outside it’s like a fresh insult – a fresh slap in the face from the elements.
If that makes it sound like I take the weather personally, I do.
Like many an alcoholic (and many a non-alcoholic too, truth be told), I have a tendency to “personalize” – to treat events that would be what they were even if I didn’t exist as if they were custom-designed to cause me misery.
The weather has long been a prime object of this habit of mine. “Why does it have to be so COLD?” I mumbled to my wife last week, coming in from my fourth and final dog-walk of the day. “I HATE this f___ing weather.”
Even as I said the words, I marveled at the level of intimacy I’d delivered them with. Clearly I really was MAD at somebody, even if there was, in fact, no somebody – other than perhaps God – to be mad at.
People tend to see this kind of personalized anger as both totally illogical and a waste of time – even more of a waste of time than anger at actual people is.
I agree. But I also have to say that there is a certain logic to it. When I get mad at the elements, what I’m really getting mad at is the physical dimension itself. I’m angry at being a BODY – a body that’s forced to move and struggle in a physical world that most of the time seems brutally indifferent to it.
Deep down inside, there’s a part of me that takes every single aspect of life in the physical world as a kind of outrage. Even on the sunniest, most pleasant day of the year, I suffer countless such outrages. A recalcitrant can-opener; a key that refuses to turn in a lock; a shower curtain that insists on wrapping itself around my legs no matter how many times I kick it away… You name it.
But truth be told, in every one of these situations the real culprit – the real “thing” I’m mad at – is never the offending object but the world of objects itself. Like that nasty gust of frigid wind in the face I’ve been experiencing so much here in New York in recent weeks, all these minor inconveniences and discomforts are reminders that I’m a limited and flawed physical body living in a limited and flawed physical world. And I don’t want to be.
This is where – for me at least – drinking enters the picture. When I drank, I got – for moments, when things were working right – a kind of transparent feeling. My body didn’t feel so heavy and substantial. On the best nights (and I’ll do my best here not to lapse into my habit of glorifying my drinking days) I’d feel like I wasn’t really made of flesh and bones at all. What was I made of instead? I didn’t know, exactly. But whatever it was it was light and quick… and invulnerable. The world couldn’t hurt it, couldn’t drag it down. I was no longer at the mercy of the physical.
At least until the next morning. One reason drunks get so battered and beat up by the world, I think, is because alcohol has this quality of making the drinker forget that he or she is actually a physical body. I used to love to put myself in situations where I’d get hurt when I drank because there was a part of me that reveled in proving to the physical world me that I was superior to it – that I was not subject to its petty tyrannies, not vulnerable to its tiresome laws and limitations.
Which gets me back to the weather. I get angry at the cold because the cold drives home a fact that, in sobriety, I no longer have the luxury of forgetting for moments: That I’m a physical body in a physical world.
But that doesn’t mean that that’s all I am. In fact, though alcohol didn’t – to say the least -- end up being a very useful way of dealing with it, the intuition that I am more than just a physical body is one of the oldest – perhaps THE oldest – spiritual idea in the world. We are frustrated with the world of matter, the world’s spiritual traditions tell us with essentially one voice, because we are not, originally, beings of matter. We are beings of spirit.
How exactly the spiritual world fell into its current material phase is a question answered by different religions in a variety of ways. But whatever the details of those traditions, the essential insight at their heart is one and the same. It’s an insight that was summed up as well as anybody by the rock group The Police back in the early 80s:
“We are spirits in the material world.”
Does this come readily and consolingly to mind every time the physical world commits some fresh insult against me? Each time a frigid gust of wind or a slippery patch of ice reminds me of how limited and essentially powerless I am down here?
Hardly. But it’s an insight I try to keep in mind all the same. Along with another bit of wisdom that’s also been stated many a time in the world’s spiritual traditions -- not to mention the Big Book: That while I should never make the fatal error of coming to believe the physical world is all there is, while here I would benefit by learning to accept its shortcomings with an even temperament.
In other words, don't take it personally.