LBOT² In May

In the past few weeks, I’ve written a few blog posts that I called “LBOT².”  If you missed those posts, here’s the story behind the title:  When I was growing up, my mom often made meals out of leftovers—not just leftovers from the night before, but from a few different meals.  My dad, a lover of acronyms, called these meals LBOT², meaning “Little Bit Of This, Little Bit of That.”  That’s what this blog post is—a little bit of this, and a little bit of that—a hodgepodge of thoughts and reflections.

Monty and I had an appointment in Ft. Collins last week.  On the way back, I realized that I had lost my sobriety ring—the ring that I bought seven years ago and had engraved with my sobriety date and a quote by Louis MacNeice.  That ring has been on my finger for seven years—I’ve twisted it around during recovery meetings, anxious at what I was facing.  I’ve run my thumb over it in moments of weakness, telling myself why I don’t want to drink or use.  And I see it on my finger with every word I write, reminding me of the promise I made to God to share my experience, strength, and hope through my writing.  So when I realized that the ring wasn’t on my finger, Monty pulled over so we could look for it.  We were in a field close to the highway, taking everything out of our car.  Monty kept saying, “I don’t get it.  It has to be here.  There’s no rhyme or reason to this.”  I was looking in the front seat when I grabbed a coffee cup that I thought was empty and spilled it, soaking my pants.  I had an extra pair of pants in the car from the last trip we’d taken, so Monty held up a blanket while I changed out of my coffee-soaked pants into the other ones—I didn’t want to get arrested for indecent exposure on the same day I lost my ring.  As we were standing there, the blanket fluttering in the breeze, I asked Monty, “Is this what you pictured when you married me?”  Monty said, “Not this, exactly.  But I’m not really surprised.  With you. . .”  I knew what he meant—I’m the unpredictable factor in our relationship—the rhyme.  And he’s the reason.  When we got home, my reasonable Monty decided to look one more time for my ring.  He went over every inch of our car with a magnet.  And he found my ring, stuck in a tiny hole under one of the back seats.

I read this quote this morning in a recovery-themed email I get daily:  “Everyone’s recipe for serenity is different.  It’s like vegetable soup—nobody makes it quite the same.” (from “Circles of Sobriety.”)  I’ve been thinking about that all day.  Every time I say the Serenity Prayer, I get a bit tripped up on that word—“serenity.”  It sounds almost mystical, mythical even, and, quite frankly, unattainable.  I think that’s because I always defined it as a state of constant peace.  I thought about it today, though, and realized that to me, peace is the absence of noise and violence and disturbance, while serenity is the ability to be calm in the midst of those things.  That sounds nearly impossible, but it isn’t.  My recipe for serenity—for a calm state of being—has two ingredients.  The first is to deal with life one day at a time.  I’ve held onto this quote from a book called “24 Hours a Day” since I first read it a few years ago:  “Anyone can fight the battles of just one day.  It is only when you and I add the battles of those two awful eternities, yesterday and tomorrow, that we break down.  It is not the experience of today that drives us mad.  It is the remorse or bitterness for something that happened yesterday or the dread of what tomorrow may bring.  Let us therefore do our best to live but one day at a time.”  The other ingredient in my recipe for serenity is to keep my focus on God—to continually look up to the One who calms and quiets me.  One of my favorite verses is Isaiah 26:3: “You will keep in perfect peace those whose minds are steadfast, because they trust in You.”

Monty and I went to see the musical “Cats” in April.  I had wanted to see it for years—the lyrics are based on the poetry of T. S. Eliot, the music is by Andrew Lloyd Webber, and the subject matter is cats.  It sounds like a musical tailor-made for me, so when Monty gave me tickets to it for Christmas, I was elated.  I was especially excited to hear the most famous song from the musical—”Memory.”  It’s based on one of my favorite Eliot poems called “Rhapsody on a Windy Night.”  And I’ve loved the song since I first heard it years ago.  The woman who sings it is portraying a dying cat who’s hoping to be reborn.  So though the song is sad, there is hope in the lyrics:
“Someone mutters and the street lamp gutters
And soon
It will be morning. . . 
Daylight
I must wait for the sunrise
I must think of a new life
And I mustn’t give in
When the dawn comes, tonight will be a memory too
And a new day will begin.”

The refrain that has been going through my head since we saw it is “Soon it will be morning.”  Those five words hold so much hope.  No matter how dark the night is, morning is coming.  I’ve known my share of dark nights of the soul—nights when I was desperate.  Lonely.  Scared.  And always, morning came—literally, when I saw the grey crack of dawn underneath the blinds, and figuratively, when I began to feel a renewed strength and hope because the darkness was fading.  The lyrics of “Memory” remind me of some of my favorite lines about hope, from a poem written by Bertol Brecht during World War II:
“In the dark times, will there also be singing?
Yes, there will be singing.
About the dark times.”

You can sing, even in the darkness.  You can sing about the darkness.  And you can hold on to this, in the face of all that is dark and lonely and desperate:  “Soon.  It will be morning.  And a new day will begin.”