Month: March 2013

The Downside Of The Web

I love the internet for many reasons. I remember a time when the internet didn’t exist and I was using a dial up modem to log onto someone’s private computer. In fact I remember a place I dialed into eons ago named Pirate’s Palace where one could get video games for free. I can still hear the noise of the model as it dialed this baud location and got a connection.

Today with just a few keystrokes, a person can find just about anything and everything on the web. From game playing to doing research, from looking for a person to connecting to someone, the list today of what the internet can do seems infinite. Unfortunately, as much as I love the web, there are also many things happening to society as the internet grows that I don’t love at all.

There is a much easier access now to engage in addictions such as gambling or porn. Information about a person that once was deemed private now seems to float around readily on the web. In-person communication once existed as the only way to connect is now slowly drifting away as more and more opt for living in a cyber world versus the real world. And something I noticed recently that I’ve been trying to tune out is the vast numbers of opinions that are being placed on the web about anything. There are opinions on places to go eat, on places to go on vacation, on all types of businesses, on different types of medical, holistic healing, and nutritional paths, on movies, and on people directly as well.

Recently with my vacation, I went to a place that had gotten some seriously terrible reviews on the web from other people that had travelled to the resort I was going to. So many different aspects of the resort had been trashed in online postings. I had decided to go against what they were saying and had booked anyway. Ironically in the end, I loved the property, the hotel on the property, and all the things the resort had to offer. For me it was a five star experience. The same thing has happened for me as well with restaurants that have gotten awful reviews online. I’ve gone and experienced them for myself and felt completely opposite having had amazing meals. With movies, so often lately they seem to be getting more and more bad reviews through places that pool them together such as rottentomatoes.com. I’ve gone to many of those poorly reviewed movies and in the end loved them completely and bought them later on DVD. In the medical and holistic realms, there are many different ways of approaching the journey of healing. Much of the healing techniques that I have tried and gotten success from have been denounced somewhere on the web if a search was done on them.

I’ve come to the conclusion with the internet that while it may be good for doing research on finding someone or something, learning the history of anything, or locating phone numbers and addresses for various things, it’s become a dumping ground for people to express their opinions on just about everything. I can’t speak for anyone else, but I know that I don’t want to live my life based upon the opinions of what someone else is saying about anything. My journey in life to be more God centered has led me to a place of trusting my own inner soul’s guidance. Many of the things that I’ve visited, dined out at, watched in a theater, or gotten healing benefit from can be found on the web with scathing reviews and warnings to not go pursue. What I’ve learned in all this is that sometimes it’s better to not do any research in the cyber world, and instead to go experience it for myself. This way I don’t become biased by someone else’s thoughts or feelings, and my experience becomes just that, my experience.

I’d rather not spend my life avoiding things that people have bad opinions about, especially those I don’t even know other than through their keystrokes left behind on the internet. Some of the best things that have happened to me in my life come from doing exactly the opposite of the mass opinions that now exist on the web. My only advice to anyone when it comes to the internet is this. Just because someone has posted one of their bad experiences on anything online, doesn’t mean your experience with that same thing is going to be the same. You never know, it may end up being one of the best things you ever pursued in your life.

Peace, love, light, and joy,

Andrew Arthur Dawson

All You Can Drink

March 17th is coming up this weekend. It’s been a long time that I celebrated any type of St. Patty’s Day celebration. I’m not Irish nor do I drink alcohol, but it’s a holiday for many of us in the AA realm, that’s deadly. I was at a meeting last night that many people spoke of the horrors of that holiday and how much green beer they drank. They spoke of how they don’t remember the parades or even of the bars they visited on that day. The last St. Patty’s Day that I celebrated would have been in March of 1995 and I only would have celebrated it just to say I had some green beer and got drunk. This Sunday, when the day actually is St. Patty’s Day, I’ll probably wear green just to stay in the fun spirit of it all, and that will be the extent of it. I don’t miss drinking at all nor my actions that I had on holidays such as this one. And just recently when I was on my cruise, I remembered why I don’t miss all those years that I spent getting drunk.

In the last year or so, cruise ships have added packages that a person can purchase for their voyage. There are the all you can drink soda packages and there are the all you can drink alcohol packages. On this past cruise, I had the premium soda package which allowed me unlimited Perrier, San Pellegrino, decaf lattes, and smoothies. Because I’m a curious person, even though I haven’t had a drink in over 17 years, I inquired on how much the alcohol package was. For $400, one could drink all the beer, wine, and mixed drinks they wanted for the cruise. I figured it out in my head with the prices they charged on the ship for a drink, that a person would need to consume at least 6 alcoholic beverages a day just to break even. What was even crazier was how many people had done that on the ship during my cruise.

I’m grateful I never did a cruise nor had a package like that back when I was drinking. I would have spent my money on it, probably had no more than 4 drinks each day because of being a lightweight, and I would have missed my whole vacation being passed out and blacked out. On one of the nights of my cruise, one of those people that I could safely assume had that alcohol package, got on the elevator around 10pm just after I finished dinner. He stumbled over himself and slurred his words asking where the party was on the ship as the elevator ascended upward. I felt sad for him. The truth is that he was me many years ago. I saw that same guy on the ship every day for the rest of the cruise and not once did I see him sober. Not once. That would have been me.

I loved the all you can drink specials at bars all those years ago. It justified my alcoholism and gave me a reason to celebrate holidays like St. Patty’s Day even though I wasn’t Irish. I’m grateful that I have a God centered life today and a strong recovery program because I know that I most likely would have been drunk on that all you can drink alcohol package on my cruise and would probably be stumbling out of a bar in Boston this Sunday and into the middle of the big parade on St. Patty’s Day.

I’m so grateful to be sober today.

Peace, love, light, and joy,

Andrew Arthur Dawson

The Meeting Before The Meeting

One of the things I like best about my home group in AA is that when I show up early, I get to set up the meeting which I enjoy doing. But there is another reason why I show up earlier that is much more important. There always seems to be at least one person who shows up just as early as me that is relatively brand new to the program who I get to say hello to.

I imagine sometimes the founders of AA, Bill and Bob, walking into a meeting in the early stages of the program, and going up to everyone present and introducing themselves and establishing a connection, especially to the newcomers. Sadly today, I have found that at many AA meetings, people show up that have been around for awhile and just socialize with those that they know and ignore those they don’t. While being social with other fellow alcoholics is important, I try to believe that Bill and Bob’s original intention was to help out every newcomer by initially making them feel welcome.

Walking into an AA meeting for the very first time or maybe even for the first few times is overwhelming. Those that have been around for awhile always seem so happy, smiling, and socializing, while the newcomer generally sits alone and is scared, angry, afraid, or one of any other number of emotions that can overwhelm their psyche. My first reaction in my early experiences with AA was to run out the back door. Having had someone come up to me and shake my hand and then tell me that they were glad I was there was key to keeping me from doing just that.

At this week’s home group, after I had set up the room, I saw a person sitting there by himself looking down at the ground. I’m not sure if it was the lost look he was portraying or if it was just the fact that I had never seen him before, but nonetheless I felt compelled to go up and say hello. After introducing myself, I asked if he was new and he replied it was his second day of sobriety and his second meeting. I gave him a friendly welcome and spoke about home groups in AA and told him if he had any questions at all about anything to just ask. I hope I see him next week but either way, I believe that I did what Bill and Bob probably would have all those years ago when AA first began. I made a newcomer feel welcomed and outstretched a friendly hand letting that person know they were not alone.

All of us in AA were at one point a newcomer and I know in my case, because of someone who welcomed me there, I stayed and I’m glad I did. AA has saved my life, brought me closer to God, and shown me how to help someone just like me who is trying to recover as well.

Peace, love, light, and joy,

Andrew Arthur Dawson