I am so grateful that my recovery meeting today focused on a saying I have not yet shared in this space. It’s a wonderful one:
Drop the rock.
The metaphor is fairly simple but the message is profound. Staying sane and sober means letting go of heavy emotional baggage: our resentments, our remorse, our fears and traumas, our character defects. It means asking our Higher Power to give us a hand in unburdening ourselves–which brings to mind another great slogan:
Let go and let God.
Letting go sounds a lot easier than it is. We addictive types can be tenacious when it comes to clutching onto everything that is weighing us down. I suspect there’s a part of me that finds my psychic luggage to be protective, even comforting. I can hide behind it, lean on it. It gives structure to my identity and my life.
It also holds me back and drags me down.
Drop the rock? I have a bulging sack of boulders. They are not unlike the collection of minerals I prized as a child. I like to dump out my bag of big rocks at least once a day and gaze at them. I ponder their essence and their mysteries, hold them in my hands and feel their weight. They enthrall and exhaust me.
One of my favorite collections of metaphorical rocks consists of every important relationship I have had in my life: Friends and family, men and women, even pets. I love to sit myself down with a weighty pile of connection boulders arrayed in front of me and consider each tie. Are we still in touch? Is our association happy and healthy? What occurred and who is to blame? What was my part in our undoing? I gaze with enormous relief at the bonds I know I can still count on, and a few I hope to revive with a call, email or reunion after the relationship-crushing pandemic has been vanquished by vaccines. I contemplate with sorrowful affection those loved ones who have departed this world. Then I turn miserably and remorsefully to face the rubble of my ruined alliances.
How to drop these rocks?
Fortunately my sobriety program is designed to help me let go of the things I need to jettison, no matter how weighty or ancient my emotional burdens.
Our Serenity Prayer, for instance, tells me to accept what I cannot change. For instance, I could stop dragging around memories of hopeless past relationships and torturing myself with them. This lovely incantation also exhorts me to take actions that are available to me. I could, for example, focus on reviving friendships that can be renewed instead of holding onto loneliness or fearing abandonment. More boulders unloaded. Finally, I am encouraged by my sober fellowship to make amends to loved ones I have hurt, instead of endlessly shouldering sentiments of remorse and self-loathing.
Just imagining these helpful actions makes me feel lighter. And ready to collect, in lieu of emotional stones, something airy and spiritual and uplifting.
Like love.
Or prayers.
Or a sense of rebirth.
Or hope that springs.
‘Tis definitely the season for dropping the rock.