After Vacation

So I just came back from a five day vacation in Jasper National Park. We were living in a campsite, cooking food on the grill, living in a tent, hiking a lot. We saw plenty of green, and wildlife, and mountains, and water. Everything was great, but people still surprised me – they were flying by in their cars, or impatiently crawling up ours from behind, as if they were in a hurry to catch a sunrise or something. “You are on vacation too, no?” I kept thinking. My girlfriend who drove kept vocalizing her anger toward the drivers, and I felt like I was back in a city, just with a different view. Anyway, we had a really good time. We saw a lot, took 200 pictures, I kept a diary, writing by the campfire at night. Then we were back to the city on Tuesday late afternoon and got right into the peak hour. The way people drove here was nuts, obviously. No surprises, but for a little while it felt like the serenity I’ve acquired on vacation was getting out the window, seeping out slowly. I managed to get a hold of it. After all I didn’t drive. Just tried to stay positive and support the driver.

There was a certain lightness within me for the whole next day, even though I had to work already. I still felt the excitement of the experience of previous several days in Jasper. The work day was not a very busy, but things had to be done, people met with, and I was planning to go to a AA meeting with a friend who needed it more than me, perhaps, and he cancelled. So I went anyway. Did I think of drinking because I had such a short vacation and my friend was being frustrating? Absolutely not. Did I feel like going drinking anyway? No, definitely out of the question. So why did I?

In this program of recovery which AA is it’s not all about how not to drink. Sure, my first 300 meetings I went to, that probably was all about how not to drink, because for me not to touch a drink for two days was a miracle. But there is life that should be looked after beyond drinking as well. Drinking, as the AA book says, is only a symptom of our life being out of whack. Yes, we alcoholics have a certain disposition of body and mind that makes us react to alcohol in much stranger way and desire it more than others, but that is not the only thing. We have/had our lives running weirdly out of control, so drinking was a perfect escape. Now that the booze is out of the picture, we still have plenty of things to look after. We have to rebuild our lives after the years of havoc. That’s what the Steps are for. Then the life doesn’t become completely perfect either (which is why we keep doing the Steps throughout our lifetime). It still runs on its own rules and we have to keep it sane and tolerable.

That’s why I have to keep going to meetings. Even if I had a great day, I still get angry, vengeful, very impatient, and sometimes I tend to isolate and procrastinate. I need to keep going to meetings to listen to the stories of others, talk to them. I still have to write about these experiences like I do now. Some days life is still not going the way I always want it to. Some other days life makes absolutely no sense. I have to come up with that sense. I have to keep it sane for me. Even after a successful vacation with plenty to see and plenty of relaxing and taking the mind off work. Granted, it was a better experience, compared to my last year summer vacation which in some sense was a disaster (you can read about it here, if you wish). And yet life is still weird and I still have to make an effort to not go completely bonkers. I have the skills for dealing with that. I just have to remember to apply them and take action. Not think about taking action, but actually taking it. Do the right things.