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I am in a pretty spiritual place these days. Key word: pretty. By that, I mean, I have moments almost every day where I want to pull my hair out about something. That’s probably common amongst addicts and alcoholics… actually, that’s probably a human thing, isn’t it?

One thing I noticed recently about myself: I end up laughing about almost every one of those aggravating moments. Sometimes it takes a week. Sometimes it takes a few days. Other times, I call a sober buddy and we’re laughing about it two hours afterward.

That got me thinking: If I’m going to laugh about something later, why can’t I do it closer to the actual aggravating moment? Why wait five days or even five hours to recognize that I’m probably overreacting and that there is humor in the situation?

I’ll give you one specific example. I have a very hard time on road trips with my family. Any parent probably gets what I am talking about. You plan to leave at 10 am, then somebody forgets a bag and you have to turn around. Then you get going and you make it a half hour and somebody has to pee. Then you make it another half hour and somebody else has to pee. Then two kids start arguing about who gets to sit where. Then you hit traffic.

It’s obvious what the problem usually is. It’s that I came up with a plan that included lots of expectations about what will happen when, and then life happens. I take tiny little issues I won’t even remember later, and make them into absolute catastrophes. A lot of it is on me.

It happens over and over again. I know the issues, and I go to that place anyway. I absolutely morph into Clark Griswold every time, where I have these preposterous expectations, then some s**t hits the fan, and I blow my stack. Every time!

What ultimately pulls me out of that funk is that I make a phone call or two to a sober friend, or I get to a meeting. And then I laugh. I always laugh. Because it’s funny—the Clark Griswold Vacation movies were always comedies, right?

Those calls always help. I’m able to find the humanity in these situations because guess what, a*****e? A 7-year-old kid doesn’t always have a Navy SEAL’s bladder control! And you know what, sometimes there’s road construction that slows you down.

I almost always end up chuckling with a friend who usually empathizes with what I’m dealing with. I’ve even made phone calls to sober friends where it goes to voicemail, and halfway through the voicemail, I am laughing at myself already.

So I’ve started to really press myself in a tense moment to say, what will be amusing about this a week from now? My goal is to try to find the humor in a difficult situation closer to when it’s most difficult, so hopefully it becomes less difficult in the moment. In that example above, if when I hear my little buddy say 26 miles into a 300-mile trip that she has to pee, why not chuckle to myself and say, “Ha, I knew this would happen! Haha.”

We’ll see how it goes. My family and I are actually going on a trip soon that is a longgggggg drive, so I will get to put this experiment to the test. Something tells me I am still going to be grumbling when I have to stop at the rest area 10 minutes from my house. But maybe instead of an hour of grumbling this time, it will be five minutes of grumbling and 55 minutes of laughing to myself.

This newsletter is a place of joy and laughter about the deadly serious business of sobriety. So, as I will often do, let me close with a joke:

FROM MEETINGS, A SLIP OF THE TONGUE:

“Our description of the alcoholic, the chapter to the obnoxious…”

(Credit: AA Grapevine, from July 2007, by John K. of Titusville, Florida)

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