Nudges from Nature

In the decades that I've been calling myself a writer, I noticed a peculiar thing: the stories I told out loud would often not get written down. The more I talked about an idea, the less likely it would turn into words on a page. Even calling myself a “writer”, which seems to be rule #1 in all the writing advice books and columns, did not make me a better writer. It did not help me produce more work, better work, sell anything, or increase any real measure of success. Sobriety has been a parallel experience. The less I talk about it, the easier it seems to be to stay the course.  NOTE: As I mentioned in my first article about this , I’m not an alcoholic, so this perspective may be completely irrelevant to you if you are. Sharing seems to be a crucial component of the AA program. I’m explicitly and only sharing my personal experience at the moment in time. I've told precisely one person about my experiment, about my curiosity that 2024 might be a year without alcohol for me. And

Although I hadn’t been drinking for about three weeks, I consider that third weekend the true start of my experiment with a year of sobriety. It's when I faced my first test. The invitation was appealing and strong. A long-time friend was coming into town. He rented a cabin up in the mountains a short drive away. He had tickets to a local concert venue, one of my favorite places to see live music. From the outside looking in, it was in many ways an ideal invitation. Close by. Music in the redwoods. A cabin to crash at.  I was ambivalent. This was a drinking buddy. We didn’t do things together sober. Backyard BBQ, live music, dinner out, golf. It always centered around alcohol. The ambivalence was another signal that my relationship to alcohol is changing. I was listening to some celebrity testimonial about his struggles with alcohol and he countered a stereotype about the challenges of staying sober. He commented that it wasn’t the bad times - the quintessential idea of looking for

I didn’t consciously set out to stop drinking. There were no New Year’s Resolutions, no proclamations, no explicit commitments to sobriety. There was just a slow gurgling up of fatigue, nausea, and distaste that emerged as the 2023 Holiday Season came to an end. Not explicitly to the idea of alcohol, but to life in general. It started by accident. It was the day after Christmas and I had been managing a mostly terrible mood since Thanksgiving. Family obligations, financial stresses, waning client interest. It all came to a head on December 26th. I didn’t want to drink that day. I wanted to stay home and rest and watch my three kids play with their Christmas presents. Play some board games. Try out the new video gaming console. But we have a tradition – a fairly new tradition that is a compromise in and of itself – that this year felt particularly like just another obligation to meet. So, we all put on some nicer clothes, loaded into the car, and headed about an hour away to spend the