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  His life was just as cold and dangerous, and I believe to this day that if I had bailed him out, he would not still be here on this earth, in the other room playing Lego Minecraft with his son. I only know that on September 13, 2011, he called me to say he had had a week clean and sober.

  As I write this, that was six years ago—six years and two months. Not that I fixate on his program, but six years, two months, two days, and three hours.

  It was an inside job, with a lot of friends who were named Not His Mother, men who got to stay sober by helping newcomers. They helped him so they would stay sober and so that he could help newcomers, too, down the road. (Trust me, they are everywhere.) He called them when he was suffering, instead of his darling helpful mother, who accepted that she had her own inside job and community. I released him (mostly) and surrendered.

  I practiced all the Gets I could think of: I got off of that poor guy’s back. I got out of his way, so I didn’t block the connection or energy between him and his higher power, whom he calls The Muffin. I got right with my own sense of God, and eventually I became a recovering higher power. I got on with my own life, which is blessed beyond words and sometimes frustrating.

  I still sometimes shop or binge, but it doesn’t help any more than it ever did—i.e., briefly, and with a hangover. So I practice the fifth Get: I get in touch with others. I tell my partner the truth about how crunchy I feel inside, how unevolved or vindictive. Or I pick up the three-hundred-pound phone and tell a close friend. Or I get in the car and head to where one of my precious communities has gathered. This might be a park, my church, my Sunday school room; with hikers, sober people, townsfolk. You show up as is, hangdog, skeptical, pissy, or superior. Someone welcomes you and pats the seat next to them. Someone will get other people water, or watch the kids, or do a neighbor’s laundry, or wash somebody’s feet.

  THREE

  Humans 101

  Almost everyone is screwed up, broken, clingy, scared, and yet designed for joy. Even (or especially) people who seem to have it more or less together are more like the rest of us than you would believe. I try not to compare my insides to their outsides, because this makes me much worse than I already am, and if I get to know them, they turn out to have plenty of irritability and shadow of their own. Besides, those few people who aren’t a mess are probably good for about twenty minutes of dinner conversation.

  This is good news, that almost everyone is petty, narcissistic, secretly insecure, and in it for themselves, because a few of the funny ones may actually long to be friends with you and me. They can be real with us, the greatest relief.

  As we develop love, appreciation, and forgiveness for others over time, we may accidentally develop those things toward ourselves, too. While you might think it’s a trick, having affection for one’s goofy, crabby, annoying, lovely self is home. This has been my meager salvation.

  That we are designed for joy is exhilarating, within reach, now or perhaps later today, after a nap, as long as we do not mistake excitement for joy. Joy is good cheer. My partner says joy and curiosity are the same thing. Joy is always a surprise, and often a decision.

  Joy is portable. Joy is a habit, and these days, it can be a radical act. Buffy Sainte-Marie said, “Keep your nose to the joy trail.” So for now let’s define joy as a slightly giddy appreciation, an inquisitive stirring, as when you see the first crocuses, the earliest struggling, stunted emergence of color in late winter, cream or gold against the tans and browns.

  To have a few amazing friends on this side of eternity, this sometimes grotesque amusement park, is the greatest joy. As Saint Bette sang in the bathhouses, “You got to have friends.” We cannot depend solely on spouses to dump on, to share our intimate thoughts with or reveal our deepest truths to. Trust me, they have been through enough just living with us. Our yokes are heavy. Healthy people need to unburden sometimes unpleasant feelings and information, such as hating everything about life and everyone on earth, and hoping the bad people are killed by snakes; or that they just ate all the frosting off a Safeway carrot cake because they were feeling fragile.

  It is very normal—and in fact, increasingly so—for anyone in their right mind to feel or do these things, and so therapeutic to tell the miserable truth.

  Everyone is capable of making at least one friend, even the worst of your relatives or the crabby neighbor down the street. We all know someone who is really pretty awful in every way yet who has managed to find a loyal friend or two. And then there are the ostentatious displays of this. Maybe your sad widowed uncle, who is angry and heavy-footed and who doesn’t even pretend to care to be interested in others at the holiday table, has a devoted friend, his own Bebe Rebozo, and even finds a girlfriend in late life, in a bar, church, convalescent home. His default assumption is that the world is mean and you need to stand up to it with suspicion fueled by fury. Don’t put your weapons down for a minute, because then they’ll get you, he’ll say, and he doesn’t even bother covering up what’s deep inside him and most of us: fear and greed and laziness. Mine Mine Mine. Then he shows up one miraculous day with a very sweet girlfriend, and at their cheapskate wedding when they dance, he holds her delicately. In their little circle of privacy, this is his sacred ground.

  This is how most of us are—stripped down to the bone, living along a thin sliver of what we can bear and control, until life or a friend or disaster nudges us into baby steps of expansion. We’re all both irritating and a comfort, our insides both hard and gentle, our hearts both atrophied and pure.

  How did we all get so screwed up? Putting aside our damaged parents, poverty, abuse, addiction, disease, and other unpleasantries, life just damages people. There is no way around this. Not all the glitter and concealer in the world can cover it up. We may have been raised in the illusion that if we played our cards right, life would work out. But it didn’t, it doesn’t.

  This is very disappointing. What a betrayal. They said.

  It was worse in almost every practical way in medieval times, but some things then were categorically true—everyone just died, the food was dirty, all rulers were evil, you didn’t expect too much. You could bank on this.

  But with antibiotics and technology came great expectations, of being able to keep our children safe, of living long and healthy lives, relaxed and content and able to keep up the car payments. Even with the Internet, deciphering the genetic code, and great advances in immunotherapy, life is frequently confusing at best, and guaranteed to be hard and weird and sad at times. These days things are about as mortally coiled as they can be, our young as vulnerable as chicks, our old just as stunningly decrepit as in medieval times but now living forever.

  We witness and try to alleviate others’ suffering, but sometimes it just outdoes itself and we are left gasping, groaning. And running through it all there is the jangle, both the machines outside and the chattering treeful of monkeys inside us.

  We believe that we are all in this together; this was the message of childhood, that being together meant connection, like an electrical circuit—think school recess on the blacktop, summer camp, and all those family holiday gatherings. Ram Dass said that if you think you’re enlightened, go spend a week with your family. With our nearest and dearest gathered together, we sometimes intuit that they are neither nearest nor dearest. No one is speaking to Great-Aunt Elaine, who voted for and is still stumping for Ted Cruz. Your mom or dad (you can’t remember which) had an emotional affair with the office manager, or the older cousins had done unforgivable things to the younger ones, or there was nothing overt but everyone sort of hated everyone else. Pass the gravy, Phil!

  The nature of our basic family dysfunction is that we want to present to the world as a kindly, engaged, smart clan that’s doing just fine. (In recovery, we call fine “Fucked-up, Insecure, Neurotic, and Emotional.”) But underneath, we have resentment, fear for our children, and an addictive desperation to check our texts. There m
ay also be an irregular mole on your thigh that pulses with death, and unexplained bruising.

  There’s just no way around this. Even when life sorts itself out and starts to work and we revel in what is working, the cosmic banana peel awaits. Without this reality, there would be no great art or comedy.

  So we savor what works when things are sort of harmonious. You almost stubbed your toe on the way to the shed, but you didn’t. Nelson Mandela got out of prison. The mole is just an inflamed keratosis. Your child finally checked in. The sun and a lemon soufflé both rose. These are fleeting, lovely satisfactions.

  Granted, these moments are not exactly the music of the spheres, but if there is enough money this month to buy new tires for the car, and if no country blew up any other country while you slept, and the food actually tastes pretty good and is not dirty? Dibs. It gives us a baseline hope.

  And there is always nature, her royal self, who offers herself both as a light show and as bread to be eaten. We hang with her as much as possible, because nature really knows how to do it when she is not being mercurial and destroying entire regions. We do get a taste of the spheres in birdsong, eclipses, the surf, tangerines. In the dark, we see the stars. In the aftermath of the devastating fire, the sun rose red.

  To pay close attention to and mostly accept your life, inside and out and around your body, is to be halfway home. An old woman in twelve-step recovery once told me that while there is an elaborate prayer in one of the steps, of turning one’s life and all results over to the care of God, as each person understands God, she and some of the old-timers secretly pray upon waking, “Whatever,” and pray before falling asleep, “Oh, well.”

  The lesson here is that there is no fix. There is, however, forgiveness. To forgive yourselves and others constantly is necessary. Not only is everyone screwed up, but everyone screws up.

  How can we know all this, yet somehow experience joy? Because that’s how we’re designed—for awareness and curiosity. We are hardwired with curiosity inside us, because life knew that this would keep us going even in bad sailing. We see the newborn energy of the universe most flagrantly in the sea and in the entire Jell-O-y wiggle of a baby. The universe expresses itself most showily as children, and it moves through children of all ages—your nephew, baby Jesus, and Ruth Gordon in Harold and Maude, shimmying at eighty in a cocktail dress. Life feeds anyone who is open to taste its food, wonder, and glee—its immediacy. We see this toward the end of many people’s lives, when everything in their wasted bodies fights to stay alive, for a few more kisses or bites of ice cream, one more hour with you. Life is still flowing through them: life is them.

  Take children with very little, and the joy of their nightly bath, the play and the purity; the combing of a toy horse’s mane, the brushing of a favorite doll’s hair; fitting things together. Little kids sharing a mayonnaise sandwich, making fart noises and speaking fake foreign languages, becoming robots and jungle animals, creating futures out of half-deflated soccer balls, magic and hilarity out of absolutely anything. We see the pleasure of the man with Lou Gehrig’s disease in a wheelchair at the baseball park with his wife on a warm clear night. The freshets of joy when things temporarily work: the senses, the muscles, the mind. We start with that freshness, which cannot be created or destroyed. That’s magic, or the human spirit, or hope—whatever you want to call it—to captivate, to share contented time.

  Some of us periodically need to repeat the joy training, rehabilitate the part of us that naturally dims or gets injured by busyness, or just by too much bad news to bear. Adults rarely have the imagination or energy of children, but we do have one another, and nature, and old black-and-white movies, and the ultimate secret weapon, books. Books! To fling myself into a book, to be carried away to another world while being at my most grounded, on my butt or in my bed or favorite chair, is literally how I have survived being here at all. Someone else is doing the living for me, and all I have to do is let their stories, humor, knowledge, and images—some of which I’ll never forget—flow through me, even as I forget to turn off the car when I arrive at my destination. I remember lines from A Wrinkle in Time from fifty-five years ago: “Only a fool is not afraid.” Even as I sometimes go out in shoes that don’t match, I remember L’Engle’s words, “Believing takes practice.” Plopped in my chair, I get to be elsewhere, immersed in humanity, exclaiming in silence, “Yes, that’s just the way it is,” or “Thank God it’s not that way for me.” I get taken out of myself, and I get to salute all the people and experiences I recognize, with surprise and pleasure. “I so get that, but I never found the words. I know her. I am her.” This reactivates the giddiness muscle, and giddiness leaves you almost no choice but to share, and sharing is what makes us happy.

  What other than books is inside me or nearby that can help connect with what has meaning? Prayer? Breath? Movement? Oranges? Cats? What about staring at the night sky? What about getting to a window and looking out with the attention and curiosity we see in little kids? I’ll do it for you this one time. Winter is almost here, so it is not exactly Versailles outside, but the earth outside my window is patched with green sprouts amid brown patches of dirt and fallen gold. The soil looks tough and lumpy. Ants walk the length of grass planks and a couple of sow bugs move together slowly over an orange leaf in a spot of damp soil. Unlike roly-polies, which can roll up for protection like tiny armadillos, sow bugs can’t roll. And they are not really bugs, but land-living crustaceans, like crabs or lobsters, that breathe through gills. Isn’t that wild? The tufts of grass are more green than brown, which surprises me. Wow: there must have been more moisture in the air and earth than I’d thought.

  FOUR

  Unplugged

  Almost everything will work again if you unplug it for a few minutes, including you.

  FIVE

  Don’t Let Them Get You to Hate Them

  How did we become so filled with hate? This is not who we are. Hate is the worst emotion of all, second only to acute jealousy.

  Certain special people of late have caused a majority of us to experience derangement. Some of us have developed hunchbacks, or tics in our eyelids. Even my Buddhist friends have been feeling despair, and when they go bad, you know the end is nigh. Booker T. Washington said, “I shall allow no man to belittle my soul by making me hate him,” and this is the most awful thing about it. Yet part of me sort of likes it, too, for the flush of righteousness, the bond to half of the electorate. Who would we be without hate? In politics, breakups, custody disputes, hate turns us into them, with a hangover to boot, the brownbottle flu of the spirit.

  Hate is such an ugly word. How about loathe for the verb, abhorrence for the noun?

  A friend once said that at the end of his drinking, he was deteriorating faster than he could lower his standards, and this began happening to me recently with hate. Some of my wise, more evolved friends say that loathing certain people, henceforth referred to as Them, is not worth the effort, that they are too thin as human forms to actually hate. I say, “Not for me, baby.” Others remind us they are all children of God, loved just as deeply as my grandson.

  I say, That is very nice.

  Hate, on the one hand, is comforting, but regrettably, on the other, it’s malignant. I loathe certain public individuals with great wriggling discomfort, and it steadies me. It’s not white-hot hate, as I can’t afford to be ignited and let it consume my life, but there is a lot of heat in there, a combination of sickness and fire. The fever makes me into a war zone of blasts, rubble, mission creep, and the ministrations of my own private USO. It steals me from what one might call my better angels, my higher self, my center; c’est la guerre. I have been one of the walking wounded for a year or so—actually more like the zombies in Night of the Living Dead, because we are fused with people when we hate them. We’re not us anymore. We become like them. They—Them—are really not doing anything to us. To some extent, I am doing it to myself—the zombification
is complete. I’m all parts: the host, the carrier, the new victim.

  I can’t change them. So I pray, Bless them with nice retirement opportunities, and change me, but while You’re at it, help them not to blow up the entire world. Thanks.

  Has there ever been more hate loosed upon the world than now? Probably. But there didn’t use to be as many automatic weapons, as much advanced military firepower, or such efficiency. Twentieth-century technology allowed the camps to be built. So . . . not ideal. Nowadays many of us feel that the coldest possible wind is blowing, as in a bad snow globe; and every day is worse. As someone said not long ago, it’s all Four Horsemen now, all the time.

  When I finally got to the point that I couldn’t take it anymore, I decided to put down my weapons briefly. Maybe I would end up on the winning side, calmer, or at least less deranged. So as is my habit, I asked God for help with the mess of me. God immediately sent in two people. The first was Martin Luther King, quoted on Twitter, that hate cannot drive out hate, only love can. That sucks. Yet it was enough for me to realize that I needed palliative care. The second was an eight-year-old boy.

  I asked one of my Sunday school kids if he believed God was always with him, helping him. He thought about this for a moment and replied, “Maybe forty percent.”

  Forty percent! What if I could reduce my viral load by forty percent?

  Everything good begins with awareness, whether awakening to the momentousness of the present or to the damage we are causing. In my case, hate is fear and anger at not getting what I want, being afraid of people whose values are so alien to me, and of the unknown. Also, of being blown up. Some of us wake up afraid, and choose our political opposites to be the focus of that fear. We think we have the answers to life’s problems—we may need electric cars, windmills, more money, and a few extra atomic weapons. Fear causes fight or flight, but hate alleviates the shame of feeling frozen. Hate is a massive mood-alterer, like a speedball of heroin and cocaine, or at least like sugar: swift, stimulating, toxic.