Higher Power(s)

I may have written about this before, but the topic always bears revisiting.  In recovery, we speak of (and hopefully take action on) the necessity of having a power greater than ourselves in our life in order to maintain freedom from our addiction. When I look back on my life experience, I can see the people and things I’ve allowed to be my higher powers. It is important for me to acknowledge, understand, and accept that I’ve allowed different people and institutions to guide and support me. It’s important for me to know that the desire to have something in my life that is more powerful than me is a basic component of me – in other words, I am always seeking a higher power, at some level, whether or not I’m aware of it. It is that desire for safety, security, connection, and purpose that is a basic component of being human.

So as I said, I’ve experienced a variety of higher powers. As human beings, our very first higher power(s) are those people who sustain our lives, and in my case it was my parents, my brother and sister, and my extended family. Then school entered the picture, and it became a higher power. It was not a higher power that I enjoyed at all. God was there, too, but God wasn’t too much of a higher power to me then – it was just something to learn about on Sundays, and, for the most part, I found the subject boring and remote. It just didn’t have much meaning for me.

Then I discovered Alcohol. Now there’s a Higher Power! I began to know a new freedom and a new happiness. I understood the word serenity, and I thought I knew peace. Feelings of uselessness and self-pity, which heretofore had been predominant in my life, disappeared. When drinking, I wasn’t afraid of people, and actually enjoyed company. My whole attitude and outlook upon life changed when I discovered Alcohol. I suddenly knew what I was doing, and I realized that Alcohol did for me all the things that I couldn’t seem to do for myself. Alcohol gave my life purpose, meaning, and joy.

If alcohol still did for me today what it did for me nearly 40 years ago, I would still be drinking today. But it stopped working. It actually stopped working long before I recognized that it no longer worked. And that’s part of the disease of alcoholism for me – I still remember when it once worked, and it is an embedded memory. That’s also why I need to continue to work a program of recovery, no matter how long I’m able to live a reasonably happy and successful life without alcohol – because my brain knows what alcohol once did positively for me, yet seems to fairly easily forget all the crap that went along with it.

So, alcohol was my higher power for a long time after it stopped being a benevolent higher power. And along the way, I’ve had other higher powers – girlfriends, wives, jobs, the State of Kansas, the State of Wisconsin, money, churches, philosophies, doctors, counselors – the list can go on and on. I’ve even suffered a few times under the delusion that in and of myself I possess everything I need to be my own higher power. In that state, my feelings become my higher power, and, because I also experience depression, negative feelings become my higher power and I become very self-destructive. I’ve had a lot of higher power experience.

I started working at a new job about 6 weeks ago, and I love it. I’m fairly good at what I’m doing, it’s indoor work, I work with a really good group of people, I get paid and I get good benefits. I’ve always enjoyed jobs that I’ve enjoyed, because there’s 8 or more hours out of each day where I actually feel like I know what I’m doing. The rest of my life is often filled with questions and confusion, and work can be a respite from the uncertainty of life. I know what is expected of me and I do it. Pretty simple.

Here’s a good spot for my definition of a higher power – a higher power is whatever or whomever I think about most and whatever or whomever I invest most of my energy into to maintain my relationship with it.

My new job was becoming my higher power. How can I tell? I was investing less time and, more importantly, less energy, in other things in my life – my recovery meetings, my prayer life, my exercise, my home, my friends, and my writing, just to name a few. All of the aforementioned stuff are the things in my life that brought me to a place where it was possible for me to obtain the job I have today.

I will note here that if what I’m doing for a living matches my purpose in life, then there’s nothing wrong with having my job as a higher power. But I’m not there yet. Few people are fortunate enough to be living their life’s purpose 24/7/365.

I am fortunate in that I can see a little bit better than I used to see. I can see that the warm fuzzies I get from going into work now probably won’t last forever, and that it would be good for me to continue practicing the other things in my life that also give me good purpose, meaning, and direction. I can see that I have a tendency (probably an understatement) to look for the one thing that will make life ok for me – like I did with alcohol, and like I’ve tried to do with relationships. So when one thing becomes so important to me that I lose sight of other good things, that raises a warning flag for me.

I have difficulty naming my real Higher Power for two reasons – the first is that my Higher Power shows up all over the place – in nature, in people, in situations, in times of quiet contemplation, in chaos, in times of joy and in times of pain. The second reason it’s hard for me to name my real Higher Power is that in naming something, I limit it. Definitions, by definition, limit something – they describe what it is, and what it isn’t. So most of the time I call my Higher Power God, but I also call It Life, Source, the Universe, Love. And, actually, there’s a third reason for not naming my Higher Power, and it’s related to the first two – I do not understand my Higher Power, and I do not want to understand my Higher Power, because the second I understand my Higher Power is the second It no longer is Higher to me. All I know is that God is greater and grander than anything or anyone that tries to explain It (me included) and will manifest Itself in ways yet unseen. All I need to know is that there is a process (of which I am mostly unaware) that sustains life, and that I am a part of that process and a part of life. All I need to do is to do my best to cooperate with that process.

I cooperate with that process by staying sober, praying, meditating, taking care of my physical self, taking care of my mental/emotional self, facing my responsibilities, participating in friendships, and giving out what has been given to me, all the while understanding that what is important is the process, not the results. Results are temporary and fade away, but what is always ongoing is the process, or life, Itself.

Thank you for being part of the process!

Namasté,

Ken