Month: July 2013

The Ups And Downs Of Being A Neat Freak…

Ok, I admit it, I’m a neat freak. But sometimes that’s not always a good trait, especially when it comes to someone who is the exact opposite of that. I recently spent a few days away at a friend’s townhouse on Cape Cod where being neat ended up becoming a thorn in that friend’s side, but more on that in a moment.

I wasn’t always such a neat and organized person. As a kid it definitely wasn’t the case as my room was often messy in the home I grew up in. Throughout college, especially in my fraternity days, I also could have cared less about keeping things clean in the places I lived, mostly because I was more worried about getting drunk or high. Somewhere alone the lines though, I began to notice a sense of anxiety arise within me when piles and piles of stuff started to accumulate around me in the places I found myself living in.

I have often wondered if my being a neat freak may have started as a substitute addiction in itself when I first got sober. For the longest time since that day, I had no real relationship with God and avoided doing any real recovery work. Because of this, my life often got out of control and this may have been the main reason why I started keeping any of my dwellings so neat and organized solely for it being the only control I felt I had in life. Regardless, most would say that it is a good trait to have and I would probably tend to agree, except in those cases where it deals with someone who is the polar opposite. What I mean by that can simply be summarized by stating that where I get anxiety when things are cluttered, there are those too who get the same feeling but only when things are completely clean and in order around them. There is a television show that has become quite popular out there called Hoarders which has shed some light on people who are like this.

In a nutshell, hoarding is a condition where people have an extreme difficulty throwing things away and keeping their places spic and span. While Hoarders may demonstrate only the extreme cases of that condition, there are many more minor situations of it, such as with that friend I mentioned earlier. While I may not fully understand what causes people like them to hoard things, I have come to believe that it is as much of an addiction as alcohol, drugs, sex, and gambling were for me. In doing those addictions, I remained numb for many years from the mental and emotional baggages, traumas, and insecurities within me. It is my belief that this same principle holds true with hoarders. Keeping things in a disorganized state can help a person focus on all the messes around them instead of looking within at their “inner clutter”.

In my journey to get rid of all my inner state of turmoil, I have found the only answer is to turn over my ENTIRE will to the care of God each and every day. This solution truly has helped me to move away from all of my addiction seeking behaviors. The more uncluttered my life has become inside, the more it has become the same outside as well. So while being such a neat freak may have started out early on as an addiction, lately it has become more of just a way of being although I still am uncomfortable when things get cluttered around me. Unfortunately, that way of being can sometimes still cause problems such as it did on that recent trip to a friend’s place on Cape Cod.

When I arrived there, things were unlike how they were the last time I had visited when it was mostly spotless and uncluttered. Immediately I felt uncomfortable upon walking in and my first reaction was that I needed to clean. When I offered my services to do that, I was promptly turned down. Upon going upstairs to the room I was staying in, I noticed there was disorganization in it as well. Without thinking, I cleaned the room up and put things away in the closet so that at least the room I would be sleeping in had some order. What I didn’t realize with that action nor with a few of the others that I did around the house, that my friend was getting more and more uncomfortable. So while I tried to get my world more in control and less anxious, my friend’s world got less in control and more anxious. The end result was my friend asking me to head home early as they weren’t feeling very relaxed on their vacation with me around. At first I was taken aback by this request, but I realized that the two of us were operating on different poles and it would most likely be healthier if I left, so I did.

I know there’s more work for me to do surrounding this as I should be able to co-exist temporarily in someone else’s space that might be slightly disorganized and clutter filled. Thankfully through my prayers and meditations with God, I can see more growth for me to pursue and at least now I have a better understanding of my friend’s condition and how my actions affected them. I think until I can work through more of this, my best course of action may be to stay at a motel instead next time!

Peace, love, light, and joy,

Andrew Arthur Dawson

A Huge Explosion Of Gratitude

If there’s one thing that I have learned to do quite well lately, it’s to look for gratitude as much as I can. Enduring high levels of physical pain can often sap a person’s will to keep moving forward, both literally and figuratively, and it also can blur one’s ability to have any gratitude for life itself. This year, I mustered up enough strength to join several friends in a venture down to the city of Boston with the sole purpose of watching the festivities in the sky on the 4th of July. It was there where I would find a wealth of gratitude develop within me.

It has been a very long time since I had tried to do something like that given the physical limitations that have plagued me in recent years. The last time came many years ago in a life that was once lived in the Washington D.C. area, where I would frequent the fireworks celebration on the 4th of July every single summer for almost ten years. In most of those times, where the heat index ran over 100 degrees, you would find me early in the morning setting up “camp” near the base of the Lincoln Memorial steps perched high atop one of the pillars that people were allowed to sit on. There I had a clear view looking straight across the Reflecting Pool upon the Washington Monument throughout the day. At night, as the sun set and the stars emerged, the fireworks would eventually light up the sky in front of that monument and over that reflecting pool dazzling me with their many colors and loud detonations. Even after sweating bullets for over 10 hours on most of those days, that fireworks display had to be the best show I would experience throughout the whole year for those 20 to 30 minutes it lasted. Many of my closest friends and loved ones, including my father and mother were all part of that experience with me at one time or another. Upon leaving the Washington, D.C. area in 2003, I ended that tradition.

I could cite many reasons why it took me another decade to head back into a major city to watch their 4th of July celebration. During the first few years I bypassed this kind of experience, I might say that it was due to the fact that I didn’t want to relieve the memories of those who had gone with me and were no longer a part of my life either because they have passed on or moved on. As more years drifted by and I became single, I would probably say my addiction based life got the best of me and robbed me of any desire to go enjoy that type of experience. But in the most recent years, the truest answer I can give as to why I continued to avoid a major city’s firework’s celebration on the 4th was that I just didn’t have enough strength on a mental, emotional, and most definitely physical level.

Thankfully, this year, 2013, I prayed to God by asking for the strength and then headed into Boston on the 4th of July with two close friends, after that decade long strike. On a day that was reminiscent of many of those heat stroke filled days I once endured in D.C., I set up “camp” alongside the river in Cambridge directly across from where the barges held the fireworks to be set off. Throughout the day I played board games with my friends, took many pictures, ate good food, had wonderful conversations, and laughed uncontrollably more times than not. When 9:30pm came, the main event would finally begin. The music blared forth and loud booms rocked the sky as many colors would once again dazzle me like so many long years ago. But the best moment I had came a short bit later as I heard KD Lang’s rendition of Hallelujah play just as the sky lit up with a huge technicolor display along with those pounding ka-booms. With tears in my eyes and goose pimples everywhere, I thanked God that I still had two eyes and two ears that worked as well as they did to enjoy something so amazingly beautiful that I had abandoned so long ago.

Through prayer and facing my fears over the current state of my mind and body, I found gratitude for that entire 25 minute show. I became grateful as well for braving all those crowds and all those times I had to be on my feet for what my eyes got to see and my ears got to hear. And I’m most definitely found gratitude for all the new memories I now have with two of my dearest friends. While the 2013 Fourth of July Fireworks celebration in Boston has now passed, I know I will always remember it with a huge explosion of gratitude.

Peace, love, light, and joy,

Andrew Arthur Dawson

Trying To Be More Patient With My Healing…

Learning patience has got to be the hardest lesson I’ve ever had to face in this lifetime. I’m speaking specifically to the healing process I continue to go through and how long it seems to be taking to physically recover from the unhealthy life I once lived. Upon deeper introspection, I have started to believe that my level of impatience is tied to more of a cultural shift happening in society now.

In the past three decades, there has been great leaps in science and technology including the development of cellular communications, quick acting medicines, faster diagnostic equipment for doctors to use, more powerful cars, the Internet, and so much more. Everything seems to be gearing all of us for ‘faster, faster, and faster’ and our lives seem to be rapidly following suit. This wasn’t always the case though.

I grew up in a time where I couldn’t text someone to get a quick answer and instead had to take the time to use a home phone. That was when cell phones didn’t exist and people weren’t living, eating, breathing, working, and sleeping with their phone on them. It was when messages had to be left on a house’s answering machine with the hopes that it would be retrieved at the end of a day when the person came home from work. It was also a time where there was no Internet to quickly look up the answer to everything and instead I had to travel to a local library to find those answers. If I wanted to see a movie, buy some music, or get some clothes, I had to leave my home and travel to various places to do any of them. Back then there also wasn’t high doses of caffeine in everything nor were there energy drinks. Television had only four major networks to choose from and I was usually forced to sit through an entire program and its commercials as there weren’t DVRs or hundred of other channels to surf to. And if I got sick during those years, there weren’t medicines to instantly make me feel better to mask what was going on inside and usually the only help was prolonged bed rest with chicken soup until it passed.

With all these advances that are speeding up society, it really does seem like everyone is becoming extremely impatient these days. What’s ironic though is that there are many locations in the world that I’ve travelled to, and many that I haven’t, where these advances still don’t exist. There, mainstream society takes things at a much slower pace. In rural China for example, healing is done through a very slow course that involves herbs and life changes. And there are still too those places out there which don’t rely upon cars and computers and mobile phones and minute clinics and prescriptions to get by. There people get along and live healthy just fine. Sometimes I wish I lived in a place like that. Many of the people I have met in those places seem so much more at peace then what it’s like to live in a major metropolitan area such as the one I do in the Boston, Massachusetts vicinity. One of my first experiences here with this city’s impatience level was a few years ago when there was a freak ice and snow storm that came on suddenly in the afternoon during the winter. Most everyone had headed home from their respective jobs at the same time as a result and the roads were almost at a standstill. As I was creeping along the road at 2mph, I had to stop dead in my tracks because the windshield wipers had completely frozen and I couldn’t see a single thing. When I got out of my car to get the ice off of them, another driver had opened his window nearby and shouted some terrible obscenities at me because I had made him slow down from his 2mph to 0mph.

I could go on and on with other examples of how life has grown more impatient with these advances in science and technology both in my city and many other cities as well, but what I feel is more important is to say that I’m doing what I can now to slow down and develop more patience in everything. On the roads, I am over on the far right lane driving the exact speed limit most often. At home I meditate and pray for a good hour each morning. During the day, I often sit outside in my backyard or at different places like a forest or the beach to silently observe life. Even with my writing I do in here each day, I am trying to slow down for several hours at a time as I chronicle my day to day experiences.

Unfortunately, even with my attempts to slow down, I’m still dealing with a level of impatience in regards to my physical healing. Having grown up with all this science and technological progress has left me wanting quick results with a lot of things in life, especially my healing. But today I’m doing what I can to be more patient with my body’s natural healing process. I admit it’s frustrating that I can’t fast forward it somehow with all these advances that exist. But maybe that’s a good thing, because as I try to have more patience with what I’m going through, I am also gaining a much greater appreciation for things in life again. Many of which I lost sight of so long ago, when I was that patient and much more technology-free, young boy.

Peace, love, light, and joy,

Andrew Arthur Dawson