Sunday, February 26, 2012

To Infinity...and Beyond

My brain is no longer a volatile mixture of booze, cocaine and insanity. The booze and cocaine have been removed and by the grace of G-d, the insanity is down to an almost tolerable level.

One benefit of this decreased volatility is my increasing ability to notice things that had previously escaped my attention.

Things like patterns of events and synchronicities that have been popping into my world.

Antecdotes and experiences others relate to me - both in and out of the rooms.

Running into friends, classmates and others right at the time I happen to be thinking of them.

Messages in books, on signs and overheard in conversations that oddly coincide with ideas, concepts and things I am wrestling with.

This past week I was able to put these newfound observational capacities to use.

For two months, I have been attending classes at Metro State here in Denver where I am studying Geology. Part of my science curriclum involves a math class wherein we are learning about various types of infinities - big infinities, small infinities, etc.

Continuing on...

Within the past week, I attended several different meetings wherein someone seemed to invariably say something to the effect of "I don't have that much time in the program..." This statement strikes me as odd and self-defeating for two reasons:

1. AA by it's nature is not competitive, but rather collaborative, and
2. You only have as much time in the program as you have. (If that doesn't make sense, please bare with me, and it might.)

So after hearing this so many times, I felt it necessary to share on it and what follows is an inexact retelling of that share:

I haven't attended school or taken a math class in 15 years so when I try to understand why I need to know about infinity to work with rocks, I become confused. So I don't try to understand it. Rather I just attend the class, do the work and see what comes of it. Now I have learned there are different levels of infinity. There is the infinity that you see when you look up at the night sky. That is a big infinity. Them there are the infinites that exist between numbers. Those are small infinities. Those are the infinities between numbers like 1 and 2 and 3 and 4. We can chop up the space between numbers into smaller pieces and get numbers like 1.5 and 2.7 and 10,685,392.1678. We can keep chopping until we get numbers like 1.05 and 1.005 and 1.0005 and 1.0005 and 1.00005 and 1.000005...ad infinitum...

What this means is staggering to me: the difference between 1 day do sobriety and 2 days of sobriety is the same as the difference between 1 day of sobriety and 10,000 days of sobriety and that is infinity...

If I haven't drank or drugged today I have 1 day of sobriety and infinite sobriety...

Such is the weird and wondrous nature of my journey into a spiritual solution...
Be well, do good work and keep in touch.