On Fantasy, Magic, and Miracles

So today's meeting was to be an "As Bill Sees it" meeting.

But, we had a newcomer.

The metal folding chairs were all set out in rows - small book in each - as people filed in and took seats.

The usual preamble, up to the question, "Is this anybody's first AA meeting, ever?"

Behind me, someone raised their hand, and the machinery set in motion.

Churning. It was just like that! Automated, deliberate, powerful, moderate speed, churning began in the room.

The entire gestalt of the room changed. Several people arose from their seats and silently began collecting the Bill books. Others went to the literature cabinet and took out the 12/12 books, began passing them out.

Not a word was said to initiate the process, and yet the process initiated and ran like a well-oiled machine, switching gears from the usual, to a newcomer's First Step meeting. I had to sit in awe, at the machinations. It was so fluid, so natural, so prepared, and yet didn't feel contrived at all. I just had to appreciate those moments.

Looking back on them, I realize I was fully there, in the moment. It was like watching AA art in dynamic motion. It was potentially a piece of a miracle.

Today, there was a batch of winners there, too. One got his 21 year chip, today. Several of them spoke, to the newcomer. It was so powerful. I wish every meeting had a few of these guys sprinkled in. Once you meet them, and hear them, and see them in life, you KNOW the process of 12-Step living, because you can feel the miracle, coming off them like infrared rays.

I'm not talking about the bullshit artists, or the smooth talkers, or the charmers. I'm talking about those rare folks that GOT it, and emanate it. You can feel it, from them. They never push it on you, because they feel no need to proselytize.

They are living examples. They are visual ironies, because when you first see them, before you have heard their stories, they are so bright, so joyous, so powerful, so relaxed, so serene, so content. It's almost hard to go back in time, into their stories, and imagine what wrecks they were. And yet, they were.

One thing that hit me today was the recurring theme from them, "I was afraid of living. I thought at the time that I loved drinking, the way it made me feel. But years out into sobriety, I had hindsight, and could see what it really was. I had no real idea what living was, and so I ran away, ran into the bottle, to escape my fear..."

"I was slowly dying, but I didn't care. I drank. I used. That didn't scare me. What I was afraid of was not dying, but of living, of waking up another morning just like that, still in that hell, twenty years from now..."

I see the Shawshank Redemption quote bandied about in recovery places, "Get busy living, or get busy dying."

I've always loved that quote. But today, I got a new spin on it.

The fact is that without that trauma - that bottom - most of us would still be running, from life. Some of us wouldn't even know it. Some of us still don't know it, that we were running, from life, afraid of living.

Chasing a euphoria isn't living. It's escaping. It's the fantasy of the too-good-to-be-true, because it isn't true. We cling to the fantasy that a magic exists, a magic that will take us where we think we want to go.

But the irony is that we don't really know where to go, and so we move on, but only to escape our present position, because we know the present position is void, and not giving us what we want, what we instinctively need.

And if it's escape, it's driven by fear. It takes a while, in recovery, to get out of denial to see this, to get to the fear, to see it for what it is - FEAR, and what it drove us to do. To see how fear distorted our perspective, inverted reality, causing the very thing that was destroying us to seem like the right thing to do, the right place to go.

The true long-term winners have the spiritual growth and time in to be able to look back and have this type of perspective. There's a depth to it. A maturity. It must be bought with work and faith, over time, to arrive there.

Fantasy thinking arises from trauma and unmet needs in childhood and beyond. It's a defense of self that keeps us from imploding, but it becomes increasingly distorted over time, the farther from the initiating event it becomes. Over the years, we incorporate the fantasies we built into our realities, and we guard them with our very lives.

This is the power of denial - denial is the protection of our fantasies.

But the process of recovery - of honesty, of maturation, of spiritual awakening - is to correct these fantasies, and gain reality-based living. We must stop the entitlement thinking that the world should fulfill our needs, and grow to cultivate our own selves instead, by turning our lives and our will over, and being willing to do the next right thing.

It's an extremely difficult process; we are highly resistant to let go of our fantasies, because they are our perceived protections, in life. When we drop the fantasies, we are left naked, unprotected. It is this very thing that brings us to our Higher Power. We are too small to endure, naked, alone. To weak.

Ironically, one of the fantasies we tend to harbor is ABOUT the experience of coming to our Higher Power. Many of us harbor the fantasy that we should have some tangible, mystical experience of our Higher Power - proof of God, as it were.

But the spiritual awakening referenced in the 12-steps cites only that the awakening is the actualization of things for us that we could not have achieved, alone. So by default, it was enhanced by a spiritual element.

In our fantasies, we chase a version of miracles that is extraordinary. But the truth is, the real miracle of sober living is in the unremarkable. It's in the unremarkable way of living that we would not have been able to achieve, alone.

I have yet to meet a user that wasn't chasing a fantasy, using. Who wasn't fundamentally driven by fear.

Our work is to put the fantasy living behind us, and see the real magic in everyday miracles.

-The Traveler