Is it easier to not do a thing at all, than learning how to do it sensibly?
These days, I am doing a digital purge. I am going through my digital photo library, deleting the doubles, the blurry, the embarrassing and the really bad ones. It’s astounding how much digital crap has accumulated over the years. Pictures of receipts, shopping lists I once had to remember, a rather large bunch of people who were once the most important to me, and now I can’t even recall their names.
Overall though, it’s still a nice trip down memory lane, and also a reminder of how my sense of time is exponentially speeding up. Looking at pictures from my 34th birthday, almost seven years back, yet I remember every conversation and joke like it was a week ago. We all had a few less fine lines around the eyes, otherwise everything looked and felt recent.
I’m confronted by the images and memories of me drinking alcohol. They stand out to me, not as an onslaught of party pictures, one more blurry than the other, me doing unspeakable things in the name of fun and attention (plenty of those as well though), but more as a central element in my interests and social circle.
There were the pictures from the wine club night where we splurged on that red wine over 100 years old from Bordeaux. That tangy, leathery smell, the deep purple-black-ish color, the sophisticated developing layers of taste in a mouthful. Exquisite. There were the pictures from a Christmas lunch a few years back where my brother had produced homemade schnapps Nordic style with self-harvested spices from his backyard. And what about the pictures from Budapest, dining at the beautiful Borkonyha Winekitchen, tasting 14 different dishes, served with a separate and beautiful pairing of local wine to each course. All of these memories have alcohol at their core. Not as the mover of things, the troublemaker, but as a vital pillar for the experiences as a whole. These weren’t times of senseless indulgence, but experiences where we were imbibing with delicacy and discernment.
It is still unclear where this whole experiment will end up. Traveling through these memories, I feel no relief about not drinking anymore. If anything, I mourn the loss of these experiences. They make me doubt if a life without alcohol is really what I want.
I guess my core issue is the lack of balance. I don’t possess the ability to only have the graceful, charming experiences with alcohol, and not the mindless consumption, the escape from myself and my troubled mind. I wish I was able to maintain this balance, and I wonder if a year of sobriety will allow me to walk this line better. But I have this nagging feeling – am I really learning to control myself here, or am I just restricting myself so I don’t have to? Although it sounds counter-intuitive, I find it much easier to not do a thing at all, than having to learn how to do it sensibly.
I hope I end up in a place of control, but I am too scared to even test myself in this regard. It’s like not knowing how to swim before jumping in the ocean. If you can’t, not many other options than drowning. Amazing how the person meticulously hand-grinding his coffee beans each morning while planning his day in rigid Japanese notebooks also can’t be trusted with a single glass of red. It all scares the shit out of me. I wonder – am I avoiding doing the real work required to have all of these experiences and still have balance and control or just taking the easy way out?