Hanging Over the Gorge.

This morning I’m in Gloucestershire, near the sea. The Atlantic fog is blowing in from down the River Avon. Upriver is, of course, Stratford (upon Avon), the town where Shakespeare was born.

My hotel room looks out over the gorge cut over the centuries by this river, over which people have built a spectacular suspension bridge:

This morning I received a recovery message in my email inbox, from one of a number of services to which I subscribe. (It’s amazing how we can all be connected through this project of recovery, no matter where in the world we are. This particular guy who sends out these messages is in California, which is eight time zones away from me now, but he might as well be in the next hotel room.) It talked about denial, which seems to me a signal feature of addiction: David Foster Wallace, a famous literary guy in recovery from addiction, once said that addiction is the only illness that tells you that you don’t have an illness. The way to counter denial is to accept reality, and that’s the purpose of the 12 steps. One way to accept reality is to accept that I have expectations and that some of them are not going to be met.

They say, in recovery, that we shouldn’t even have expectations. But can I ever get rid of all my expectations? I’m not sure. I think having expectations is pretty normal. I can try to let go of my attachment to them, though.

I boarded the plane fully expecting it to be a crappy old USAirways jet with no leg-room and broken video screens. Instead I found a brand-new airbus with that new-car smell and fancy high-res touch-screens offering not only movies but also a GPS system that tracked the plane’s position and speed in three or four languages.

I boarded with only half a charge on my iPhone, expecting to be disappointed when my battery ran out, and then slept for most of the flight and didn’t listen to music anyway.

I brought my new running shoes, expecting this morning to run my 3.5 miles along the River Avon, or maybe over the bridge into the park in Somerset, but it’s “chucking it down” (as they say over here when it rains) and I’m coming down with a cold and there’s no treadmill in this hotel so I can’t run. At least not today.

And lots of other situations.

I’m spending a lot of this week with family. When you tell someone you’re going on vacation with extended family, ever hear them say, “You’ll be ready for another one when you get back”? Family vacations can be pleasant and a lot of fun but they aren’t usually real vacations because of the expectations I bring to them, and because of how difficult it is, sometimes, to let go of the outcomes of those expectations.

Today that’s my exercise: letting go of outcomes. Basically Step 11: accepting the will of another power for me today, and asking for the ability to carry it out.

Also whatever other exercise I can work in. I can meditate. I also brought a yoga mat. And there’s always the bridge, where my son and I did pull-ups yesterday: