An excerpt from Side Trips From Cowboy

Addiction is one of the most misunderstood diseases, but it is not a figment of addicts’ imaginations, nor is it incurable. It is a mental disorder that manifests itself as compulsion. It is as real as cancer and just as deadly.

Addiction is cancer of the spirit, and its cure is found in Spirit.

There are many treatments for addiction, including detox, counseling, institutionalization and psychotherapy. The most effective and efficient “cure” so far found is the Twelve-Step Program, a spiritual path to recovery invented by an alcoholic named Bill W. in the 1930s, one he used to combat his own disease. Not only does it work, it is open to anyone who needs it without exception, universally available in the United States and much of the rest of the world and very nearly free (free-will collections for refreshments, literature and facility rentals are taken regularly). It is the best treatment that money can’t buy, and it is based on the recognition by participants of the presence of Spirit — the God of their own understanding — in their lives.

Part of any Twelve-Step program is learning to take responsibility for our actions, past, present and future; but the load of shame, anger and denial carried communally by an addict and his social structure has to be given up for the addict to make true progress toward recovery. It is not easy to do this individually — and sometimes impossible to do so as a group — for giving up a way of thinking and living, no matter how harmful it is to a person and those around them, requires resolution,commitment and a willingness to face the unknown, which includes the territory of personal responsibility. Neither an addict nor everybody around an addict may want to participate in recovery, and one of the hardest things an addict or someone dealing with an addict has to do might be making the decision to leave those people to their own devices and go without them into a world of personal freedom.

This seems to imply that folks who live around addicts need to take part in recovery, too, and that’s what I mean to say. When the addict begins to deal with his or her problems and issues, it is likely that some other folks around him or her are going to have to start dealing with theirs, too. Addicts don’t always live alone. In fact, most of us have families and jobs and many of us sit on church boards and coach little league teams. An addict strives to “look real,” even though they probably don’t feel very real at all.

There are many ways to escape the reality of everyday living — alcohol, drugs, compulsive gambling, sex and love addiction, nicotine addiction, workaholism, television addiction, addiction to money and addiction to power. There are many more, but I think all addicts have the same basic problem. We are addicted to pain, and we are addicted to pain because it is more tolerable than facing the unknown on a daily basis. We would rather hurt than live in fear of the Great Ambiguity that is the Universe.

Many more of us who don’t think of ourselves as addicts are driven by something or another, whether we admit it or not. We keep our noses to the grindstone, our eyes on the ball, our shoulders to the wheel and the pedal to the metal. We become
contortionists in the name of progress. We keep busy achieving. We look forward to success. It’s how we stave off fear of the future, but in reality, we may be living Satchel Paige’s joke more than we care to admit.

“Don’t look back,” he said, “something may be gaining on you.”

Addiction is not so much about alcohol or drugs or gambling or sex as it is about the soul of the addict. Addiction is a malignancy that grows in the soul — spiritual cancer — a disease Steve Rookie and I named growupus interruptus.

The tumor starts to grow when we begin to indulge the addiction, whatever it is, that act or substance that brings a kind of warm haze over our mind and shuts out all the whirling world for the length of time that we indulge it. At that point in our lives,
whenever it is and unless something or someone intercedes, we contract growupus interruptus. When the addiction is firmly planted, we cease to mature emotionally or spiritually, for the addiction rechannels the nourishment meant for those things into
itself, and it matures instead of the addict.

At one point or another, the addiction tries to assert itself as the primary force in the individual — in other words, kill its host. Then, the addict has to make that choice: quit or die.

If this seems overly dramatic, consider this:

Just after I joined my first Twelve-step program and had quit my symptom addiction, I met a man who taught me the word “pustiny.” It is a Russian word and it means, at first glance, two very different things. The first meaning is “desert,” in the
most deserted sense — a flat, arid place devoid of life. The second meaning refers to a monastic setting or a tiny, very basic, one-room house with a single source of light and a religious icon of some sort on the wall; a spiritual retreat. The second meaning makes perfect sense if you consider the sacred tradition of vision quest or the revelatory journeys of the prophets from Moses to St. John the Divine. Pustiny, the desert, the wilderness, is where people have often gone for spiritual centering.

He who taught me about pustiny was about to take his vows as a Catholic monk — not a priest — and he was desolate. In retrospect, I think he was suicidal and that his reasons for joining the order might have been the same reasons that I was an addict.

I was in my crazy days of withdrawal then, and I knew of some cabins near the airport — small, two-room efficiencies set on a lot with some mesquite trees and not much else. I liked the idea of living there in one of them, away from the main part of the city and not attached to any other apartments. I thought they might be my pustiny. When I drove there, though, they were being torn down, which didn’t surprise me, the way life was going at that point.

It was a Saturday, and the work crew wasn’t there, so I got out and walked around the place and discovered that one of the buildings was still full of someone’s possessions.

Here was a small house with the back wall ripped away and the entrails of someone’s life spilled through the hole onto the desert. Whoever wasn’t there had thought he would come back but had not. From the calendar on the wall and the condition of the food in the refrigerator, I concluded he’d been gone about three weeks. He might have gone to work one morning or out for a night on the town, but he had no thought when he left the dishes in the sink and the bananas on the counter that he would not be back.

Something caught him by surprise.

There were books there: How To Win Friends and Influence People, When I Say No I Feel Guilty and a Living Bible inscribed “From Mom.” His clothes were there, his shoes and pants and shirts. His dishes were there. He was not there, and I somehow knew that he was dead, insane or in prison — an addicts other choices beside recovery. The image of that place became a touchstone, an image of how close we can come to disappearing into our troubles, being eaten alive by the tumor in our soul, and how one day can make a difference in the life of a person or the world.

That day is today. One day at a time.