Need for present joy

I am enjoying not being in school, sitting at a desk and listening to lectures about the Federal Code of Regulations on inspected passenger vessels.  The instructor for the Master's course was not as knowledgeable as my first instructor.  He also read the book out loud to us.  He made remarks during the class that indicated his particular take on society and the government.  During one of the exercises, he blurted out, "What do ya'll think will happen to Sandusky in prison?".  I have an idea, but wondered what that had to do with the course I was taking.

Anyway, now the class room lectures are over, and I have an exam this week and two next week to take.  Then I will turn in all the paperwork to see what size license I can get.  I will be very glad when all this is done.  I am glad that I went through with it but am tired of using my brain.  I actually want to vegetate for a while.  I'm finding it hard to divert attention away from material for the exams.  Thankfully, July fourth holiday will keep me busy doing happy things that have nothing to do with exams or school.

My wife and I had a discussion this morning about the caregivers getting a puppy.  It's a done deal that they are getting a border collie puppy.  My wife gave her approval.  I don't think that a puppy, especially a high energy puppy like a border collie, is appropriate to be around my wife's 90 year old mother who has difficulty walking.  She asked what I thought, and I told her.

I know dogs and have been around them all my life.  A sedate adult dog would probably be a great companion and might spark a lot of happiness in my MIL.  But bringing in a puppy seems a bit much. Only time will tell as to how this works out with the elderly mother and the elderly cat she has.  There are times that I wonder, "What was she thinking?".  But I know to let this go and not lecture or make it an issue between us.  After all, this isn't my business.  These are her parents, and she does a wonderful job in making sure that they are comfortable and watched over.

I am going to home group tonight.  It feels like an eternity since I was there, even though it was just last Monday evening.  I can feel that I need the peacefulness of the meeting.  And the grounds quiet the restlessness that has come to be part of my day since beginning the classes over three weeks ago.  I can tell that my stress tolerance for exams and classes has diminished with age. I want this behind me.  I want to do low key stuff like gardening and sailing.  I like what Helen Keller had to say about going to college:

Gradually I began to find that there were disadvantages in going to college. The one I felt and still feel most is lack of time. I used to have time to think, to reflect, my mind and I. We would sit together of an evening and listen to the inner melodies of the spirit, which one hears only in leisure moments when the words of some loved poet touch a deep, sweet chord in the soul that until then had been silent. But in college there is no time to commune with one's thoughts. One goes to college to learn, it seems, not to think. When one enters the portals of learning, one leaves the dearest pleasures – solitude, books and imagination – outside with the whispering pines. I suppose I ought to find some comfort in the thought that I am laying up treasures for future enjoyment, but I am improvident enough to prefer present joy to hoarding riches against a rainy day.

There will be some whispering pines swaying in the hot breeze tonight.  I want to share these photos of where the home group meets.

Where we meet

Huge pine tree in the Serenity Garden

Statue of St. Francis at the base of the large pine

I will be back to write and comment as time permits.

Back in school

I am in Sea School for the weekend.  Today was a long one, but the material was interesting enough.  I think that I have a fairly good grasp of the material.  Tomorrow, class will start again at 8 AM.

When I got home this evening, I wolfed down some dinner and went back over the material from today and began to prep for chart navigation tomorrow.  I am glad that I still have the stamina to put in a long day of class work and evening study.  I had to smile at one of the young fellows in the class who took a nap at lunch and didn't wake up until we were over an hour into the afternoon session.

One of my strong suits has been sheer determination.  It served me well with studies and a research career.  It also worked against me terribly for all those years that I thought my determination would make sense of alcoholism and change my loved ones to being how I wanted them to be.  It's another example of how a character asset can be a double edged sword and work to my detriment.

I don't have time to make comments on your posts, but I will do so when I get a chance.  For the moment, I am reviewing what I learned in some of the piloting courses that I took last fall.  I'm glad that I did some prep by taking those courses because I can see the befuddled look on some of the faces of those who have not done this work before.  It surely is a lot to cram into a few days.  All of those years of focusing in meetings and being an intense listener is actually helping.

I wondered what each of you were doing while I was grabbing a sandwich at lunch.  I hope all is well.

Eternal student

I am home after taking my Seamanship exam.  I'm glad to be done with courses for a while.  I will have a few months off before I go to Sea School in the middle of June with the goal of getting my Captain's license.  I don't think that I will use the license in a professional capacity.  It's one of those bucket list things that I want to do.

I seem to be the eternal student of something.  I keep telling myself that I won't take another course and yet, after a few months, I'm ready to sign up again.  After Sea School, then I think that I will take a photography course or two.  Also, I want to become a vessel examiner.  Whew--lots of interests that seem to keep me studying something.  Maybe I am meant to be a jack of all trades or perhaps a dilettante.

One of the great things about having free time is that I get to explore new avenues of study.  I don't have to juggle so many commitments as when I was working full time.  I'm not sure that I have the drive anymore to put all the newly learned things towards a second career.  In fact, I can tell you that I don't have that drive.  I simply want to be learning these things because they interest me.

Next week, on Monday nights,  instead of going to a lecture, I'll be back at my home group meeting.  I have missed being away from the small group of friends that attend there.  I suppose that I will be an eternal student of Al-Anon as well. I keep going back for lots of reasons, not the least of which is my tendency to resort to old behavior patterns and ways of thinking.  It takes a while to change a lifetime of reacting to circumstances.  I am comfortable with the message, and no matter how hard I try to be perfect, I realize that this is one thing that I can't achieve through study.

“Be a Student of the Game. Like most cliches of sport, this is profound. You can be shaped, or you can be broken. There is not much in between. Try to learn. Be coachable. Try to learn from everybody, especially those who fail. This is hard." ~David Foster Wallace

A brand new day

Over the last 24 hours, I have come to a much better place in my head--a place of forgiveness for me and for my father-in-law.  I talked to my sponsor,  I talked to my Higher Power, I read your comments and emails.  TAAAF over at Through an Al-Anon Filter wrote the following to me:

"I've been in that place of being appalled at my own "reptilian reaction" and it was excruciating; I'd really thought I was getting somewhere in my recovery.

I'm grateful for my first sponsor, who reiterated enough times for me to hear her, that I was only human, and the reason we have Step 10 is because we are going to continue to be wrong. No way around it. We may have only a few years in 12-Step, we may have 25, but we are going to screw up. Regularly. At times, spectacularly.

 

When we lose control, we may feel shame, or unworthy, embarrassed, humiliated, depressed. Perhaps we begin to wonder whether our perceived recovery is all a smoke screen we're hiding behind, and we haven't really changed at all - all perfectly normal responses to that rush of rage, and however we acted while in its grip.

 

You're a good man who loves his mate, and she was being threatened - that bypasses all the civilized veneers, and taps into the primal self.

 

Examine it, take your own inventory, make an amend however you choose to do so, and after discussion with your sponsor, then move on. You are not one scrap less of a wonderful loving and good-hearted man now, than you were the second before your response. You're the very same man, who has learned something new about himself."

 

Yes, I have learned something about myself, although I knew the survival and self-defense mechanisms were there already.  Another comment led me to read about elder rage (thank you, Lena, for suggesting the book--it has been ordered).  I have a much better understanding of the Jekyll and Hyde personality changes that we have been seeing.  Hopefully, more will be revealed from evaluations by geriatric psychiatrists and the internal medicine doctors.

I do have flashbacks of what happened.  I am forcing the images out of my head, but they aren't gone. And I am grieving the change in, and perhaps loss of,  a relationship that I have had for a long time.  But I am not blaming myself.  My wife feels better as well, after reading your comments and information about elder rage.  Neither of us has experience in dealing with a situation like this.  We are learning, have the legal system backing us, have talked with DSS, and know that we are doing the best that we can to protect both of the parents and keep them comfortable.

The best thing is that my mother-in-law was playing cards and listening to jazz yesterday.  She was happy and having a good day in her little world.  No one was yelling at her.  We each deserve peace in our lives no matter how it is achieved.

Al-Anon closing

A part of the closing statement for Al-Anon goes like this:

Talk to each other, reason things out with someone else,
but let there be no gossip or criticism of one another.
Instead, let the understanding, love and peace of the
program grow in you one day at a time.

I like the idea that we can talk to each other and reason things out with someone else. To me that means that if I reach out my hand for help, a hand will be there. Every group has some members that consider themselves or are considered by others to be wise and knowledgeable. They may or may not be the "someone else" that you want to reason things out with.

Occasionally, there may be a person who believes themselves to be the authority on a topic or in general, or the group may recognize them as an authority because of their time in the program or for some other reason. When I first came into the program, I heard a lot of people who had a great deal of wisdom. I couldn't relate to all of them. Eventually, I was able to find people whose perspectives were applicable to my situation. So if you don't hear what you need to hear, keep seeking until you find the soul who can provide the experience, strength and hope you need. The closing does not specify who that "someone else" should be, and leaves that to us as a freedom of choice to determine.

The meeting closing discourages gossip and criticism. I don't see that happening in the meetings that I now attend. But I do know it occurs in some meetings.  At times, I am put off by some of the things that I hear and see.  But when I remember that each of us is only human, and that the ego can really fool me and make a fool of me, I am much more accepting.  Although we all have many different personalities, the one thing we all have in common is we have been affected by the disease of alcoholism.

With all these different personalities come different opinions and different actions. Sometimes I don't like those actions, sometimes I don't especially like the people. But something I learned early on in my recovery is that I can learn something from people that I don't like, and I can respect their opinions.  They have the right to have their opinion which I may or may not agree with.  I don't have to gossip about them to other members or be critical. I can respect them for who they are. I can agree to disagree. "We aren't perfect." I am here to continue to recover, not take someone else's fourth step inventory. That's not my job, it belongs to their HP and to them.

 

The last part of the closing sums up the essence of the program: "Instead, let the understanding, love, and peace of the program grow in you one day at a time."

Getting behinder

I can tell after my first night in this course that I have a lot to learn about plotting.  Not the kind of plotting in which I am scheming but the kind where I use a divider and a protractor plotter.  I really like the course thus far and thoroughly enjoyed the two hours in the classroom and the 2 hours of study after the class was over. 

This is the type of thing that I thrive in.  I simply enjoy lectures, reading, and putting information to practical use.  I probably could have been a professional student if I hadn't had to get out and actually get a job.  Things that I would have liked to continue to study would have been art history, English literature, French, German, anatomy, and all aspects of navigation and piloting.  An explosion of neurons is taking place as I rev up to work on this course.  It will run for 11 weeks.  And I am supposed to take another one on engine maintenance starting next week.  I feel as if I am back in graduate school. 

So tonight I got home after 10 PM.  I missed my home group meeting and won't make that for another 10 weeks.  That is a down side to my continued education as a mariner.  All I know is that I have a passion for learning as much as I can.  I will get back to home group as soon as I can.  In the meantime, I will be plotting a course to get from point A to point B. 

It is kind of like Al-Anon which is about the journey and not the destination, with lots of way points thrown in.  And my job is to avoid the problems as I navigate so that I can arrive safely.  I can tell that this is going to be a lot of fun and a good challenge.