recovery as metaphor

“I’ve been feeling a little bit down of late. It’s the process of maintaining my sobriety. It’s repetitive and it’s relentless and above all it’s tedious. When I left rehab I accepted your influence. I committed to my recovery and now two years in I find myself asking: Is this it? My sobriety is simply a grind. It’s just this leaky faucet which requires constant maintenance and in return offers only not to drip. … I used to imagine that a relapse would be the climax to some grand drama. Now I think that if I were to use drugs again it would in fact be an anticlimax, the impious surrender to the incessant ‘drip, drip, drip’ of existence.”….sherlock holmes “elementary”

have meant to post a bit about the thursday evening show titled “elementary” for some time. i have come to covet the weekly hour with the updated and smartly written prose that explores and microscopes the human experience as well as addiction and recovery.  on repeated occasions i found myself humbled at the finesse used in the writing to convey some of the complexities and the intricacies that make up emotional recovery the exodus from the realm of hungry ghosts. this particular journey ignites the inspiration for this blog.

the series is smart, modern, suggestive, and hopeful. the main character is recovering from an opiate addiction bundled with a prolific iq coupled with an extraterrestrial case of ocd. the details that show themselves through his journey affect all his comrades with amazement and inspiration. sherlock remains an enigma straightforward and simple all the while complex and precise. the human quotient of his character shines through in almost every episode in his demonstrations of loyalty and care for his friends and acquaintances that say someone who has gone through a spiritual experience. his decisions and strategies are made with a foundation of solid ingredients empathy, judgement, and generosity.

i don’t at all claim that i embody these attributes. i simply imply that this is what i strive for in my life. honestly i fall short of these almost daily. but i continue to trek towards a structure built with those embodied in this literary version of sherlock holmes. the simple solutions to the most perplexing situations in life as deduced by someone so simple and so astute.

what is that slogan they say in the rooms?- KISS- “Keep It Simple, Stupid”

In reading some reviews and blogs about the same subject i humbly share something that struck me as profound. this was found on tv.com/shows and written by nullnull2654.

“The Eternity Injection” dealt with one of the central aspects of philosophy and science.

“Time and how people experience it”

A nurse is found murdered and it shows that she had taken part in an illegal trial for time-dilating drugs, administering different amounts of it to five test persons and was killed by one of them. This man is also found dead with an autopsy revealing that an unknown chemical substance destroyed his brain. From the remaining four study participants, one died in a hospital and three are missing. Sherlock, Watson and Kitty succeed in finding one of them alive after a very funny lock picking scene, where Kitty is lectured about the right tool to open the door by both Sherlock and Joan who are standing behind her. The interrogation of the man leads to the identification of the scientist who conducted the trial and from there to a rich, but fatally ill person who financed the trial and ordered the test persons to be killed. A very well constructed plot and beautifully woven into the background story.

Jack Connaughton is a man with obviously unlimited financial resources but only a very limited time left to live. So he finances the invention of a drug that would dilate the time in his brain. He would have the feeling that years had passed where in reality it would only be days. He wanted to have the illusion of nearly eternal life.

For Sherlock it’s just the other way round. He compares his life with a dripping faucet that releases one drip after the other relentlessly and monotonously. Hours and days seem like an eternity for him, expressed in a marvellous soliloquy; Kudos to Craig Sweeny for these wonderful words:

“I’ve been feeling a little bit down of late. It’s the process of maintaining my sobriety. It’s repetitive and it’s relentless and above all it’s tedious. When I left rehab I accepted your influence. I committed to my recovery and now two years in I find myself asking: Is this it? My sobriety is simply a grind. It’s just this leaky faucet which requires constant maintenance and in return offers only not to drip. … I used to imagine that a relapse would be the climax to some grand drama. Now I think that if I were to use drugs again it would in fact be an anticlimax, the impious surrender to the incessant ‘drip, drip, drip’ of existence.”

So what is time? Does it exist at all? Why do people experience it so differently?

These questions bother philosophers, psychologists and scientists around the world ever since and they probably cannot be answered at all but one central insight is that

“time perception is a construction of the brain that is manipulable and distortable under certain circumstances.” (source: Wikipedia)

Sometimes you feel like there are simply not enough hours in the day to do everything you would like to do, but then there are days, especially when you are feeling down, when time doesn’t seem to pass at all, what is especially difficult for people suffering from depression, because they feel that way most of the time. Good times pass, but luckily that means that bad times pass, too. Please don’t take offence that I quote from the Bible now, but it fits so well here that I just have to do it.

A Time for Everything

There is a time for everything, and a season for every activity under the heavens: a time to be born and a time to die, a time to plant and a time to uproot, a time to kill and a time to heal, a time to tear down and a time to build, a time to weep and a time to laugh, a time to mourn and a time to dance, a time to scatter stones and a time to gather them, a time to embrace and a time to refrain from embracing, a time to search and a time to give up, a time to keep and a time to throw away, a time to tear and a time to mend, a time to be silent and a time to speak, a time to love and a time to hate, a time for war and a time for peace.

(Ecclesiastes 3 Verses 1-8, New International Version)

I think that is all that has to be said on the matter.

P.S. I liked the choice of the name for the company that paid the participants of the trial: “Purgatorium”. The purgatory is, according to the roman-catholic church, a place or time where the souls of people are to be cleared before they can enter heaven. The pain is to already sense the love of God, but feel unworthy to deserve it because of your sins. Prayers of the living can help to shorten the time.

After a fashion Sherlock is in a state of purgatory. He knows that the people around him care for him, but he isn’t able to get out of his state of mind. Sherlock will not give up though. He makes that clear at the end of the episode.

“I will be fine. It’s just a temporary malaise.”

this seems insightful and inspired. but really it is just as i try to keep my recovery- elementary.

#allday #ministry