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I just got back from an awesome trip to San Francisco with my wife. She’d always wanted to go there, so I gave her a trip to San Fran for Christmas.
We did all the tourist stuff, including riding a trolley car and touring Alcatraz. But while I was there, we also took note of something called Waymo. Waymo is a driverless car service, similar to Uber just without a human in the driver’s seat. On our first day there, we kept noticing dozens of these cars taking people around, the front wheel spinning and the turn signals coming on without an actual human doing it.
For that first day, we were pretty startled by it. But by the second day, when a friend from the San Fran area recommended we try it at least once, we decided to give it a shot. So I downloaded the app, put in my credit card info and booked one.
The car pulled up that morning and my wife and I both gave each other a look, like “Here goes!” It’s the same look you might give a friend right before you jump out of an airplane.
For the first two minutes, it was jarring. A robotic female voice comes on and tells you to buckle in and enjoy the ride. There is a message warning you against trying to grab the steering wheel. And then we were off.
It took some getting used to. But I was stunned how quickly we both just started looking out the window and enjoying the ride. The car had a computer screen in the middle where you could see all approaching cars, people, squirrels, everything, and the car never once seemed confused or on track to drive into a ditch. I was quite impressed.
I couldn’t help but think of my journey to find a steady higher power. I have one. But the relationship always feels tenuous, and every time I try to explain it to someone, I don’t even know how. It works for me but it’s a little confusing sometimes. Part of me wishes I would just stumble into a church and a religion somehow. But it hasn’t happened yet. The journey continues.
There’s the obvious comparison, that life is one big driverless car and no matter how much we try to grab the wheel and steer for ourselves, it doesn’t usually work out well for us. For me to be happy, I need to let go of so many things, and I need to accept the world as it is, not how I want it to be. Anything other than that is pretty miserable and also inevitable—the more I try to squeeze the wheel myself, the more pain I am in, and also the more I realize that it is a pointless exercise, anyway.
But then there is the concept of struggling with finding a higher power. I’m relatively certain that of the alcoholics I know, a large percentage of them scuffle on some level to figure out their higher power, how to rely upon it and how to understand that higher power. So that means that I and many of my fellow sober people are on a constant quest to click our higher powers into place.
My issue is, I know that and yet I barely try. I pray once a week, usually less. I don’t attend church regularly. I don’t spend much time asking spiritual friends how their higher power works. I do the bare minimum to lead a happy life. And honestly, I haven’t felt much pain because of that. My life is pretty great. So I feel like it is working quite well for me.
But going back to the driverless car example… my Waymo showed up and literally took the wheel. I was able to sit in the back and surrender. But think about the work that I did to land in that place. I investigated how it works. I asked a trusted friend about them. I downloaded the app. I filled out the information they needed. I paid for it. I booked it. I did a lot of work before the car picked us up.
To go back to the higher power situation, it’d be the equivalent of me seeing a Waymo drive past and then shrugging my shoulders when one didn’t magically appear in front of me to drive me around for the day. I had to invest in it in order to be able to connect with it.
That has really sat with me for the past few days, though I’m still trying to figure out how it will translate into my life. The one thing I can tell you is, if you struggle with a higher power, you might want to fly cross-country immediately and get yourself a driverless car.
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:
Heard at meetings:
“I think alcoholism is contagious. I know I caught it after going to a few AA meetings.”
(Credit: AA Grapevine, June 2000, Alan M. from Melbourne, Florida)
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