Timeline
I learned once that the past is a dream, and the future is a vision. And the now is, well, now.
When I look back on my life, I can see the events and decisions that have led to where I am now. There are pockets of adventure, joy, contentment and success. There are also markers of fear, anger, regret and resentment. In some cases there are traumas that pain me and don’t want to go away
A view of my history, from what I can remember and am capable of understanding, looks like a linear timeline. One thing led to the next thing and that leads to the next. While I can take bits and pieces from the whole and remember them, every part of my life is a consequence of what happened preceding it. So, from that standpoint, the playback of my past is linear. It can’t be cut and spliced, and what’s there can’t be erased. The effects of things like alcohol can keep the pains of my past at bay, but ultimately what’s happened has happened.
What I try to be aware of from my own past, is that even though the playback is linear and cannot be changed, along the way each marker of my existence wasn’t locked into moving forward to the next marker. At each point in the timeline, there were innumerable events, choices, circumstances, and influences that moved me to the next point.
Sometimes the things that happened to my life were not of my doing. Many influences affected me negatively, and many positively. What I chose to do with each life-event wasn’t locked into the next event in my life as if I had no control over outcomes. I concede that there are many parts of my life where the outcomes were not in my control. But what happened after those outcomes was. Eventually, no matter the trauma or inspiration, as my life moved forward, I had the freedom to choose how past events affected me, and to make a choice of how that would influence me moving forward.
If I were to keep an unbiased score of my blessing and the wrongs against me, and a count of those I have blessed and wronged along the way, I imagine that the outcome would be relatively balanced. But for some reason I put a great deal more emphasis on what affects me from mild discomfort to outright pain than on what is beneficial. Even if I were to have an accurate set of statistics that showed my life had been more influenced by the positive than the negative, I know from my own thinking that the negatives would have more emphasis. I’m not sure if it’s human nature to think this way, but it is in my nature.
It’s important to have a clear viewpoint of my historical timeline. It’s important to take individual pieces out of that and inspect them. Even the items that are painful and traumatic still serve a purpose in the makeup of me. I try to take these things and dissect what happened, what the event was, and how I reacted to it moving forward. How I reacted wasn’t just immediate, but also it changed my thinking and position on my future. It’s this time in my life, right now, where I challenge myself to use these past events as learning and developmental, despite their negative impact.
The burden and pain of past traumas can only be alleviated by approaching each in this manner, and by having the hindsight to link a series of events together to see a larger outcome. There is a lesson to be learned from every single memory of my past. Some of them are positive outcomes form correct decisions and influence, and some are negative based on flawed decisions and improper influence. Regardless of how extreme, when added together, all of the events have led to who I am now. Although I cannot change how the events of my life occurred, or that they occurred, I can use each to make a conscious decision about what I am going to do next in my life.
An important part of recovery is the insight that there are things I can control and things I cannot. The initial steps of recovery are realizing that drinking alcohol in any amount leads to a complete and disastrous absence of control of my life. The obvious first step is to stop drinking entirely. For an alcoholic desiring to leave the clutches of the dis-ease, this may seem like a turnaround in life’s circumstances and results. But in reality, it’s only the beginning. Life’s events that lead to the feelings that alcohol subdued have to be addressed or those feelings will continue to overwhelm and the stresses of them will lead back to the bottle.
The point I am trying to reach here is that in order for me to make the proper decisions now, I have to learn from all of the decisions I have made in the past. Where I have been negligent, I must take wisdom from why I was negligent, what that negligence caused for me and others. When I have been successful, the same formula must be applied. This is particularly important for memories older than 2 years, and that have plagued my psyche for some time and still do to this day. These painful events have become locked into my thinking patterns and belief systems and only do me harm. Each has a negative influence towards what I am going to do now. They are tethers to my past that hold me back from feeling validation, contentment and happiness in my future.
The decisions I make at this exact moment are only limited by me. If I am locked into thinking patterns and beliefs that continually tie me to past actions, how can I expect anything different? It’s the lessons of my past that I should be using to my advantage now.
I’m not selling sunshine here. To take a chance on doing things differently and outside my comfort zone means gambling between success and failure. Most successful people will attest to the fact that their good fortune came from a string of failures. Yet after each, the successful person uses the experience of failure to create a new chance at succeeding. Sometimes it could be as drastic as scrapping hard work and planning for an entirely new starting point and path forward. Whatever my cause moving forward, success is obtained by learning from what I have done and applying it to what I want to do.
One of the things I want from my life is to experience happiness. I’m fully aware from the teaching of my past that happiness is not an ongoing event. It’s often a momentary event in life. Sometime the moments are brief, and other times they last a little longer. The key to experiencing happiness more often is creating an environment where happiness is never far away. I do this by taking those times in my past that were unhappy, and those that were, and applying each beneficially to what I do now.
One of those events is alcoholism. My polluted mind while under the influence would have me believe that alcohol was what made me happy, but retrospect says otherwise. At best, alcohol gave me relief from how unhappy I truly was. I drank to forget what I was and who I was. I drank to quell emotions that caused me pain. I drank to keep having an excuse to keep drinking. The cycle is vicious, and the underlying factors that allowed the cycle to begin in earnest are based in my timeline. The factors that allow it to perpetuate existed in the timeline I was creating moment to moment.
The obvious reason for recovery from alcoholism is to stop drinking. That will always be the primary purpose. But in addition to that, recovery is a program of growth. Through continuing and expanding those actions and thoughts that keep me from seeking alcohol, there is a natural progression to further better myself to the benefit of myself and others around me. Recovery is as much a self-improvement program for my life as it is a separation from addiction. Some of those things I became addicted to are the cycles of negative thinking about negative periods in my past. The realization of that means that I’m not just concerned about not drinking, but also changing the narrative of the events of my past. These two factors, my past and my alcoholism, are tied together tightly. Each feeds off the other when both are in play, and the outcome from that relationship is temporarily relieving, but ultimately catastrophic.
Knowing all of this helps me greatly in my decision making now. It helps me to have an internal voice that is optimistic and looking toward the positive and finding happiness. It helps me to create a vision of what I want to be as my future self. I can now practice the behaviors that are to the benefit of myself and my environment, and through that practice greatly improve my odds of gaining and maintaining a happy life.
I also have to be realistic about the fact that life throws circumstances of all types at me. No matter how well I maintain what I have control of, wrenches of all sizes get thrown into the works. Some of them require grief from loss, anxiety from stressful circumstances, or guilt from my mistakes. No matter what happens in the present, by practicing the behaviors to make recovery possible, I now have tools available to bear present burdens without falling back into alcoholism. Even in a set of situations that may seem overwhelming, I can apply what I have learned in recovery to eliminate alcohol as a solution. Recovery allows me the mental, physical and spiritual strength to weather the storms that may come, knowing I have the power to overcome the storms of the past. It’s not an on/off switch. It’s patience, perseverance and understanding that by enduring current hardship, and keeping close to happiness even if I’m not experiencing it, over time the hardship will fade, and happiness will remain close.
I have remained strong in my personal recovery by not allowing my linear past to dictate my dynamic future. Instead, I make every effort to take the lessons of my linear past and use those to help create a dynamic vision of my future. My determination to forever end the influence of alcohol over my life, and to take the conditions that were underlying causes of my acceptance of alcohol as a sedative and turn them into learning experiences, has given a greater spectrum of what recovery can be. This allows me to grow with recovery, and that life decision to be rewarding in growth and not become stagnant. We should all seek growth in all of our endeavors, even those that are hard to live with. Through that, each of us can develop a new timeline that courts and then embraces happiness when it comes, and when it corresponds to our vision of the future.