Tomorrow morning, you may reach for the same things.
The phone. A glass of cold water. The false explanation that made the morning before feel familiar. As the room emerges from the dark, the version of life you’re actively creating, whether it’s abstruse to you or not, is already perpetuating itself between the cracks in the ground which you walk.
There’s a certain and true sense of all too rare control there for us to seize. People need some aspects of their lives to remain intact. Wherever and wherever we call our bliss would be a pretty uncomfortable place, physical, mental, or spiritual if all pathways led somewhere foreign to us every day that we strut through.
There are certain trends that loop in our daily behaviors that are out of our control much to our oblige. We predict interactions before they manifest. We listen to our own excuse we already know we will have. Somewhere within the pattern of viewing the pattern through the window, we may or may not acknowledge that it is, or often has been, set on a loop. Then change can become daunting and we can begin to feel like a mime rewarding themselves for their performance to a mirror.
This results in absolute certainty offering an odd sense of relieved comfort. If the future is already set in stone, it would take off our shoulders the uncomfortable feeling that comes with our attempts to add our contribution to it, either in forms that are direct and those which simply cause ripples that eventually become tidal waves of influence. I happen to have a little bit of knowledge about that comfort and the fee one must pay for it.
From age twenty-five to thirty-five, I was addicted to hard drugs. Needless to say, the necessary work on myself and my life wasn’t just procrastinated, but completely postponed. During those years, I also became practiced at postponing the work that is required in the process of my individuation. I would come up with ideas, and after the initial joy of creative discovery, I would completely abandon them. I announced creative projects that never reached completion. I became far too complacent, and I was oblivious to the truth that I no longer cared about advancing in my endeavors. I allowed lies and the lousy amount of care I was giving it to become my new standard for myself. I had been aware of this yet refused to do anything about it.
All these factors varied in their excuses and their results. I do not mean to compare addiction simply with unfinished endeavors to simply a failure of discipline. That would entail no awareness of the weight that it causes people who love you. I can, however, say that there is undeniably a direct correlation between the life I was surviving and my actions that were creating it. I would announce projects only to briefly inhabit the feeling of completing something. I would make empty promises to my loved ones just to imagine a repaired relationship before I actively lived the actions necessary to follow through with that promise. An announced project could briefly let me inhabit the feeling of having made something. A promise could let me imagine a repaired relationship before I had done the repairing. Tomorrow held an growing, more detailed version of me, but I allowed my days to be mundane.
The first thing I found myself unable to turn a shoulder to was how much it was affecting my relationships.
What gradually became impossible to ignore was the damage to relationships. As I began to have myself and only myself, my route to individuation began to forget the most important pathway, which was the meaning in my human connections. My poor choices began to bleed into the lives of those I loved and cared about. Even though I wanted to believe that it was only me experiencing the pain, that wasn’t the case.
Upon first entering treatment, I found myself aloof and dissociated from recovery because the idea of changing my entire life all at once was daunting. The tagline with recovery, though, “one day at a time” seemed like a manageable order. I did the classic “90 & 90”(a meeting a day for 90 days, engaged in intensive outpatient, continued to work with a sobriety coach who is a dear friend of my family and me seeing as he has seen me through five years of being in-and-out of treatment facilities as well as comforted my family during my whole journey to sobriety, and found a therapist so fitting for me, I deem it a miracle. I have made a decision to continue to live in Asheville where all of my treatment has taken place versus returning to the scene of the crime in Greenville, SC.
My morale increased gradually as I immersed into the program. I asked myself if the guarantee of a better future was realistic when I had returned to the same patterns of behavior so many times in the past? I could not predict my future, but I came to realize that I didn’t have to see the whole picture, I could just contribute the small pieces of each day that would eventually add up. Changing my old ways meant having to surrender to the idea that I could do it alone, and I began to humble myself to the advice I had once myself resisted. So, that ended up being MY path, not something scribed in the stone that applied to all people unconditionally, and it taught me that the phrase, “acceptance precedes change” could indeed be reversed.
I started this trilogy with thoughts on music’s place in tomorrow as well as the tomorrow it has helped us see throughout history. Improvisational musicians draw on “stock”, or all the other ideas in music that are already in the book as well as a honing of their craft all while keeping their ears selfless so as to communicate effectively with what the other musicians are playing. One’s bettering of themselves doing their part can help them to build new responses and that can influence what happens next even if it doesn’t solve the answer of whether or not free will exists. This trilogy began with a vision of tomorrow, then looked at the science of predicting it– now we look tomorrow in its eyes that beg for full participation in it and we silently answer it with a “yes” in active confirmation throughout every area of our lives. It can never be measured just how far an aubade sung by the dawn to a stranger, a lovers’ embrace, or a moment of musical alchemy may travel. In order to salvage today’s secrets, we must remember there are many to come after us. They all deserve a tomorrow, too. .