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I saw a hilarious meme the other day on one of my favorite Instagram feeds, Sarcastic AA memes. Look it up—it’s well worth your time.
This one says “This God stuff is okay but I need a solution that is instant and temporary.”
That one made me laugh because it is very, very true for me. I just wrapped up a hectic fall where I had three kids in two different schools, and those kids were on five different sports team and in one children’s theater production. I spent every day from about 2-8 pm driving around to the same places, over and over again, feeling like an unpaid Uber driver. I of course whined and moaned and groaned about it, and said I felt run ragged from all the driving and frustrated by the lack of appreciation from the kids I was driving. I can’t tell you how many times I sighed at about 4:15 because I had just sat in traffic for 15 minutes, then in a parking lot waiting for another 10 minutes, only to be greeted by a grumpy teenager who bottled up their teenager-ness all day and then threw it in my face.
Poor me, right?
Then the activities pretty much all ended for the fall, and suddenly my evenings involved very little driving in the evenings. I found myself with lots of extra time to meditate and read sober literature… just kidding, I didn’t do any of that. I played on my phone, watched YouTube videos of people getting hit in the groin and devoted plenty of time to sporting events on TV, some of which I didn’t even care about. I remember watching horse racing at 11 pm one night on some obscure channel. I didn’t know any of the horses or the stakes of the race or anything—it was just mindlessness. Then I wondered why I wasn’t feeling great.
The answer is that instead of filling up my soul with the stuff it needs, I often times go with junk food. My phone is the most frequent thing I reach for to find a higher power that is instant and temporary, as the meme mentions, and boy do I do that. I got an alert this week that I had used my phone almost nine hours per day over the past seven days, and I immediately thought it must be an error. And it kind of is: A lot of my phone time is listening to podcasts while I work out or go for a walk… but a lot of it is also screwing around trying to get some dopamine hits from nonsense.
So on one hand, it’s a good reminder that the solution to all my problems isn’t on my phone, and it’s not on my TV. But I also want to try to be forgiving, too. I’m wired to look for temporary and instant as a solution, then catch myself and remember that my spirituality is the key to finding happiness, but then that is temporary and instant, and then I catch myself again… arghhhhh. I guess the lesson is, everything is temporary and instant?
This newsletter is a place of joy and laughter about the deadly serious business of sobriety. So, as I will often do, let me close with a joke:
Alcohol and calculus don't mix: Never drink and derive.
(Credit: Grapevine, September 2009, by Anonymous)
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A hilarious meme to contemplate