It’s not a black-and-white world. That’s one reason why the idea of giving up drinking – of never ever taking a single drink again, for as long as I lived – struck me as crazy when I first heard about it. After all, everybody knows that the minute you decide that you’re never going to do something again, some situation comes along that makes you do it anyhow.
Then something unexpected happened.
I hit bottom, went off to rehab… and found myself brought over to the black-and-white team despite myself. Maybe it really was possible – a day at a time -- to simply stop doing something for good.
Back in New York City I put this thinking to work everywhere, wallpapering my old world over with the fresh, new, and decidedly black-and-white ideas I’d learned at rehab.
A big part of my life-overhaul centered on my health. During my final days of drinking and drugging, my physical shape was the last thing on my mind. Not anymore. Now I went to the gym every day, just like I went to meetings. Every day? Every day. Very, very black-and-white.
On one of these black-and-white days, coming home from the gym, I stopped by a deli to get a bottle of water and noticed a box of funny-looking little vials at the front counter. “Ginseng,” said the label. I’d always heard ginseng was pretty healthy stuff, so I bought one.
From then on, each time I stopped there I’d buy one of these little vials and choke it down. The stuff had a mossy, slightly bitter taste, but its unpleasantness only added to the feeling that I was doing something good for myself: Taking another small but healthy step in living my new no-compromises, no-gray-areas, no-drinking life.
I’d been following this practice for a couple of months – well past my 90-day mark – when one day I happened to take a slightly closer look at the little vial of ginseng essence I’d just swallowed.
“Ingredients: Ginseng in a base of 45% alcohol.”
I stopped in my tracks and read the label again. Maybe I’d read it wrong the first time?
But I hadn’t. 45%: In other words, 90 proof.
Standing there on the sidewalk with the cars and busses whizzing by and pedestrians bumping past me, I felt a moment of complete, free-falling confusion. Who was I? What was I doing in the world? What on earth was ANYONE doing in the world? In the blink of an eye, my black-and-white vision had turned to gray. This philosophy I’d adopted – this crazy pseudo-religion built around the concept of not drinking alcohol – all just fell away like so much wet oatmeal. And with it went… everything else.
I went back to the deli, bought another of the little vials, went home, found a shot glass in the back of one of our kitchen cabinets, and emptied the vial into it. Then I held the shot glass up to see how much alcohol I’d really been taking in all these days.
There wasn’t that much there. But all the same, there was some – enough to cover the bottom of the glass. I held it up to my nose and inhaled. There, hiding underneath the mossy ginseng essence but detectable nonetheless, was that old familiar smell. Alcohol.
“See?” a voice in my head that had been pretty quiet in recent days piped up, “I told you it was impossible!”
As it happened, this sudden discovery that, technically speaking, I’d been drinking for just about every day of my sobriety didn’t end up torpedoing my resolution to stay sober after all. I stopped buying the little vials, and in a few weeks had more or less put the whole thing out of my mind.
But I never forgot about that moment in the street. That moment when, thanks to a few words printed on a label, everything just… stopped making sense for a second.
Is the world a black-and-white place? I, for one, don’t find it to be so – at least most of the time. But navigating life without any black-and-white concepts is like trying to row a boat with your hands. Black and white thinking is necessary, but it's dangerous. Dangerous because it can limit and blind one; but also because it demands that we actually change ourselves to accomodate it. If we really come to believe an idea, then when that idea is threatened -- as it inevitably will be -- our very being is threatened right along with it.
I myself can't live without at least a certain number of black-and-white concepts. But that day in the street taught me that holding these concepts requires that I keep a certain sense of humor about them -- and about myself. Because if I don't, the world will force me to anyhow.