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ALIVE
Saturday Dec. 7, 2013
Nothing special. Just another cold Saturday.
Significance of particular days rest, remembered in memory cells. If you are old enough to remember 1941, it is a riveting day in history.
For others it is just the memory of ‘Pearl Harbor’ day. Or maybe you remember the FDR quote about a ‘day that will live in infamy’. I have those recollections too, and do a pretty good FDR impersonation.
Greater meaning and memory for me.
Twenty-seven years ago, in my family room in Edmonton while watching television, I put down my drink, half-finished. Haven’t had a drink since.
It wasn’t high-drama for anyone else.
Nobody noticed.
Well, nobody else noticed.
Some people need to find their gutter or their rehab, some people need lots of Doctors or a Betty Ford Center experience, some people need to take the pledge, some need to get their wake-up call in emergency rooms, some in the morgue.
Alcoholism isn’t a one size fits all disease, or addiction. Which of those it is, many are divided upon, but what no alcoholic can deny, is that it is personal.
And yet it isn’t.
Impacts on others are easily denied.
I know.
I’ve done plenty of that denying but denying doesn’t change facts.
I am, and always will be, unable to have alcohol in my life.
Someone asked me, just yesterday, if after all these years, if I am sure I would have a problem. After some discussion he realized that isn’t a risk to my life that I’m prepared to take. There is too much at stake.
Too much to lose.
Today, as bumper stickers say, is just another ‘one day at a time’ day.
Life in sobriety is so much better because you can see all your problems.
Solving an alcohol problem in our lives, in mine at least, was not solving any other problem at all.
Sober, they were all there, lined up and ready to face me. I had not been ready to face them until I got sober.
This morning, all my problems in life are up, awake and at work.
So am I.
It might be easier, albeit temporarily, to avoid or ignore them.
Truth is, some days I do because you can’t stare down every scary critter in your scary closet every day.
Sometimes I need to take a day off from that. I do.
What I cannot do, is take a day off from being sober.
My life depends on it.
Mark Kolke
200,728
column written/ published from Calgary
morning walk: -26C / -15F, calm, clear, cold …. took Gusta for a short walk – too slippery/hard to walk far
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