Nudges from Nature

There's something sharper to my daily experiences since giving up alcohol a few weeks ago. Alcohol was a warm blanket. And now it's gone. The comfort of habit. The lure of the familiar faces at the wooden tables of the local brewery. The split-second "aw fuck it" decision to have another round, and another, and turn away from the compounding responsibilities of life. That's gone. Like Ebenezer standing in the snow, peering in envy through the window at the warm scene inside the meager home of the Cratchit family, sobriety has me standing in the cold. The effect is stark. The truth is the crisp chill is the reality. Alcohol just put a comforting layer between us. Over the years, the layer got thicker. It went from a thin throw to a down blanket with high fill power.  At some point, the whole thing got a bit wet. I was forced to abandon it. It's not unpleasant to be standing here, though adapting has me in a mild state of discomfort.  I seek new and more reliabl

Overall the experience of not drinking for the past six weeks has been overwhelmingly positive. Is the honeymoon period over? One thing is clear, I don't miss drinking. I don't miss the negative physical effects post-drinking, and even the warm buzz of a few beers -- there are other ways to enjoy the passage of time. But those things are all about the absence of alcohol -- the removal of drinking from the routine. What's left underneath?  This week my frustrations are running hot.  I'm less patient than usual. Irritability seems to be at a constant.  Enough time has passed where I suspect this is not due to any withdrawal symptoms. It's not due to the lagging effects of stopping alcohol consumption. I'm past that.  It's a "now what?" feeling.  I think it has something to do with a sharper, clearer picture of my own limitations.  Yes, the effects of stopping alcohol are overwhelmingly positive. The removal of those negative effects -- the hangovers,

I have been and continue to be motivated by this suspicion that giving up alcohol will prove to be a silver bullet for many, most, or even all my problems. It occupies a space in my mind like a skeleton key: Problem with work? Not drinking will solve it. Problem with a relationship? Not drinking will solve it. Problem with motivation? Not drinking will solve it. I know this is incredibly naive. Yet, I willingly relish in it. The social media algorithms have kicked in and my feeds are now flooded with testimonials from celebrities and influencers about the topic of giving up drinking. The soundbites are compelling.  "My life has changed."  "There's me before I stopped drinking, and there's me after." "My career was good. I stopped drinking and my career was great. Beyond my wildest dreams." The soundbites don't tell the whole story. Theyare statements that over-simplify the journey. Selective reminiscences.  One of the initial draws of my accide

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

I'm not sure what exactly led me to create my own sourdough starter. It was on an ideal Spring day -- one of those first days in Spring that is noticeably warmer than the ones preceding it and clearly indicates Winter is now definitely behind us. I opened the window above the sink in the kitchen and I saw dandelion, cottonwood, and various grass seedlings floating on the gentle breeze finding its way through the field behind my home. I was immediately taken back to a memory of years earlier where I learned that sourdough was a product of the wild yeasts and airborne microorganisms that occurred everywhere. The combination of those invisible fauna near the San Francisco Bay were particularly unique, the legend goes, and contributed to the region's world famous sourdough bread. All you needed to do, was combine some water and flour, and sit it near an open window. Give it a few days and when bubbles formed, a whole world of potential combinations and artistry would open up to you