10,227 DAYS SOBER
Sunday Dec. 7, 2014
If only I could do life over . . .
Ever had those thoughts?
I doubt I’m alone in terms of having thoughts – tugs back to times past, to wish away decisions we made in favour of different consequences.
As if our paths would have been different.
If I’d walked a different route to school …
Or taken a different job …
Or moved across the country …
Ah, then things would have turned out differently!
Does anyone believe that?
To think one thing, one event, one person, one action might have sent us and our entire life down a different path – how crazy is that?
If only.
I doubt choosing any other path in life would have altered my drinking, my being an alcoholic. I am one, I am son of one. I doubt it mattered which day I was born or continent on which I lived, I’m an alcoholic.
Then, one day, a single act changed my life, my path, my …
Everything.
Twenty-eight years ago today – I put down my drink.
Haven’t had one since.
Is everything different?
I think so …
Many things have happened since that would have happened anyway, but not to me.
Why?
Because I wouldn’t have been around, wouldn’t be alive.
I am so very grateful for being sober twenty-eight years.
It seems, as changes go, to be one that has stuck.
I’m glad about that too. Still just as crazy, energized, fraught with complications making dreams and ideas come true – but alive to do it, alive to tell the tale.
Sometimes serious. Sometimes laughable. Sometimes funny. I am here all week …
Mark Kolke
P.S.: I was once asked if there was a connection between me quitting and Pearl Harbor Day, if there was any connection between the two in terms of making my sobriety a big event. I don’t know. Compared to something like that, we are all small. Compared to the alternative, for me, of not quitting, it was as large as things get in life. I was watching Jeopardy on TV. I put down my drink. It was a little thing. It was a huge thing. Hugest. 10,227 days is just one day at a time for 28 years.
column written/ published from Calgary, AB
morning walk: -2C/28F, treacherous walking on yesterday’s melt that left nearly every shoveled walk a skating rink of sorts; we walked in the deep snow instead which is a bit of a workout. Fresh air invigorating … with more mild melting manifesting all day, and all week if the weatherman is right …
Reader feedback:
Morning Mark The west coast on Vancouver Island is nice, yes we have rain but here in Parksville it will be +9c today!, LA, Parksville, BC
It may be sorely tempting to be a permanent Maui resident, Mark, but your grandbabies are only young for a little while, and bonding with their Grandpa, Poppa, or whatever moniker you chose, is SO important .. for them, and for you!, BR, Calgary, AB
