Zen and the Art of Chewey Maintenance
Eckart Tolle spends countless pages of his books emphasizing the issues created when someone is identified with their mind.
Perhaps the most standout analogy on the matter comes when he compares the mind to a parasite, writing “it is not so much that you use your mind wrongly - you usually don’t use it at all. It uses you.”
This hits home, each time I read (or rather, listen) this passage. The smallest of occurrences in my life can cause my brain to get wrapped up in the axel of my mind, and honestly I don’t know from time to time when a mechanic is going to come unravel that mess. Sometimes this pattern can go for days, weeks, months, or longer.
Prior to my sobriety, this mind bender would often result in a bender of different sorts, culminating in a ridiculously long list of terrible decisions, such as the time I rode my motorcycle to a mountain town, with no plan for return, only to eliminate any possibility of getting home after I had finished my sixth old fashioned of the night. With the smallest moment of clarity hitting me at one point, I pulled it together just long enough to turn to cuddle prostitution, finding a lonely 63 year old woman and falsely leading her on so that she would provide me with a bed to sleep on for the night.
After coyote uglying my arm at sunrise, and audibly asking “where am I?”, I spent the next several hours alternating between riding home in near freezing temperatures, and vomiting on the side of the highway.
To be fair, the woman was very kind, and rather attractive for her age, and my coyote ugly reference could be more accurately described as gnawing off my ego. I’d like to say I was chivalrous, but does it really count if you just blackout?
Anyhow, this sort of self-destructive behavior was becoming all-too-formulaic.
Since becoming sober last year, I note that my cravings to use substances of any type come not from some chemical pull to the substance, the way it was when I quit smoking for example, but rather my desire, need, obsession even, to silence the mental noise that so easily dominates my life when triggered.
Perhaps the quickest trigger I have in my life can almost always be found in a scenario that involves the perception of someone withdrawing from me. This is undoubtedly connected to childhood trauma, of which I will write about another day, but what bothers me most is that I have to give it any power by realizing its connection in my adult life, some 30-40 years later. At what point is a normal human being just simply able to suck it up and move on? Well apparently this human hasn’t yet mastered this skill.
Enter Chewey….
Chewbacca just got his balls removed yesterday, which coincidentally were the largest of the two tenants who reside in my condominium
Chewey smiles despite being unburdened from his balls and having to wear the cone of shame
He wore the cone of shame all day and night. He’s got a wicked incision. He’s been drugged, poked, and caged. And yet when I ask him if he wants to go outside his tail wags as fast as it did 48 hours ago. The dude is sans testicles and is still happy being present with his best friend. If it’s possible to be envious of a 10lbs Tribble, I am.
Humans are weird. We do things that are good for us, even if we didn’t want to do them to begin with, and walk away thinking “that was so amazing!”, only to experience panic attacks the moment we consider doing them a second time.
I’ve never been to an AA meeting in which I didn’t walk out thinking how cleansed I felt afterwards, and yet I avoid them like the plague until I feel guilty enough after having used my umpteenth weak excuse which borders on the equivalency of “I’m doing my hair tonight”.
Then I remember Tolle’s sage words, knowing that I’m projecting into the future or living in the past as the reasons for these excuses.
Two months out of rehab I attended a narcotics anonymous meeting in Albuquerque with several of the “brothers” that I “graduated” with. Present at the meeting was Lorenzo, a young man the same age as my son. Lorenzo was brilliant. His mind worked in ways that most 28 year-olds couldn’t even begin to fathom. He had clearly been through a lot in his life, having been to rehab on five prior occasions, and honestly he looked like central casting for an extra in Leonardo DiCaprio’s “Basketball Diaries” as Junkie Teen #3. But Lorenzo was smart enough to realize something that he used to say during group share at rehab: “I’ve got another relapse in me but I can’t guarantee I have another rehab”, which turned out to be darkly prescient of him. That NA meeting would be the last time I would hug Lorenzo, as he died two weeks later from a fentanyl overdose.
I don’t know what led to Lorenzo choosing to use again, but I can speculate based on so many deep conversations we all had during my 30 day stint in the facility. Lorenzo could never shake the image of the man he thought he was, which was crafted by nothing more than prior experience. Experience is so invaluable for so many things in our lives, but it doesn’t define us as who we are, even the mistakes we’ve made don’t have that power. An addict seems to most struggle with our inability to live in the present moment, always wanting to numb pain from the past, or blur the anxiety we create about the future.
My grooming skills are legendary. Just ask Chewey.
I groom Chewey. I am not good, as Chewey would tell you if he could, often times taking unbalanced chunks of fur off of him. But he doesn’t care. As he sits on my grooming table, looking lovingly into my eyes as I give him a mullet, he’s just happy right there. He doesn’t see too much fur come off of him and get pissed about how embarrassing that will be in the office. Hell, even when I have to manscape his nether regions, the poor boy deals with the discomfort by trying to squirm away from me, but the minute he’s back to the table, he’s back to himself and present and at peace.
Interestingly, I find myself the exact same way when I groom Chewey….at peace. So maybe Robert Pirsig had this whole thing figured out a while ago, but I needed to swap my motorcycle for a Shih Tzu to realize the zen that comes with maintaining Chewbacca.
