How Not to Be a Hot Mess - A Survival Guide for Modern Life - Craig Hase Page 0,38

we learn to ride the waves and weirdness of our particular storms.

STAY CLEAR

Craig

The final piece of advice the Buddha has to offer on how to feel valuable and whole and happy while the whole wide world burns is simple: don’t get drunk.

Whoops. I just felt a disturbance in the force: hundreds—no thousands—of readers around the world putting this book down and picking up their iPhone.

Well, just to keep things interesting, and since I’ve never been one to back down from a bad argument, I’ll throw in another one:

Don’t get high, either.

Don’t shoot heroin, don’t smoke crack, don’t crush pills up into itty-bitty piles of blue powder and then blow them up your nasal passage for that lovely little head rush of self-dissolving bliss you’ve been waiting for since Thursday morning. Also don’t smoke weed and don’t sniff glue and don’t take your dad’s prescriptions and don’t drink entire bottles of cough syrup and watch your face melt in the bathroom mirror.

Don’t do any of these things. Or the Buddha will be mad at you.

Just kidding. Well, not about steering clear of substances that cloud the mind, gunk up your judgment, and generally make you less able to adequately live the life you most want to live right now. Not kidding about that part. Just the Buddha being mad part. He won’t be mad. He died years ago, after all.

So what’s the deal? And what’s it got to do with staying grounded right in the middle of the tornado-like maelstrom of information, culture wars, technology, politics, overwork, underpay, and your neighbors who won’t turn the music down at 3 a.m.?

Well, maybe it will be helpful to talk a bit about my own process with all this.

YEARS OF LIVING HAZILY

I hail from a family of alcoholics. All three of my parents (dad, mom, stepmom) drank heavily when I was young. All three of them were sincerely and thoroughly invested in what I think of as the “mystique of intoxication”—this backward, highly branded, advertising-infused assumption that getting sloshed is somehow part of the good life, that it’s sophisticated even, and that it brings people together.

I therefore grew up simultaneously horrified by their behavior—screaming matches, drunk car accidents, extremely poor financial decisions—and yet also somehow sold on the underlying premise that getting drunk was pretty cool. I associated alcohol with being relaxed, with sex, with good times, and with lavishly talking to people at parties that, looking back, I never really wanted to be at in the first place.

I’m astonished and a little dismayed to report that this sort of beleaguered thinking lasted a very, very long time for me. Even after many small and big lessons on why alcohol is not such an obvious winner, I continued to drink to ease social anxiety, take the edge off at the end of a long day, and, more to the point, just because it was somehow inexplicably a part of who I was—an indispensable allocation of my cultural heritage.

Until it wasn’t. Because very gradually—and this process took years—as I saw that getting drunk led to more regrets than fond memories, I stopped getting really truly toasted. And then, very slowly, something fundamental shifted. I started to notice that the kind of relaxation that alcohol provides is, in essence, a sort of dullness. As I gradually fell in love with the clarity of mind that comes from meditation and mindfulness, I slowly cut down on those moments when drinking alcohol seemed like a thrilling proposition.

Finally, I was just down to drinking on special occasions and at fancy restaurants when one day I realized, sort of all of a sudden, that alcohol and celebration were not, in fact, one and the same thing, and that I could celebrate the heck out of something or someone without getting a little tipsy. So I pretty much stopped.

These days I barely drink at all. I mean, if I’m at someone’s house and they’re drinking wine, I’ll have a glass with dinner. On a wild night, I might even have two. But I rarely drink at home and I can’t remember the last time I got drunk. Unsurprisingly, my life feels no less sophisticated, my connections with others have only improved, and when I say or do stupid things, I have no one to blame but my own bad mental habits.

Still, there will be a loss. Whenever we give up one socially sanctioned behavior for another perhaps-less-socially-sanctioned behavior, there is a loss. Some friends will not cheer you on; some friends