Our Way, No Other!

We like to do things: “Our way and no other.” Although this seems true much of the time, it is nonetheless not our plan. Whether we like it or not we live according to a plan that seems laid out for us to follow or not follow. Our way or the plan’s way is the measure of failure or success in the events of our life.

In the process of our lives as we work this plan we can end up blessed by it to the extent we submitted and worked through the events that make it up. Accordingly we are dealt the opposite, namely conflicted, to the extent that we fight the plan and choose our own way.

It is at the end point of the plan, the end of our early years and our middle years, that we are able to add up the benefits and must deduct the deficits in having dealt with the plan. We can’t determine what is plus and what is minus, the best we can do is observe the result and evaluate our lives using the plus/minus of plan results in determining the quality we have obtained with our lives.

This of course is done in our senior years most often but can be done at any time in our lives.

I go more into Working to the Endpoint! in an essay I posted some time ago and have posted it again in my Archive. Click on the title to go there to read it.

There is a Plan that seems to dominate us. It is not our plan, it is something that keeps monitoring us and carrying us through what appears to be unrelated chaos of events in our lives, one after another, each requiring our strictest attention to work it out.

Our lives seem to jump from event to event, too often the event being something we would never have chosen to do, but faced with it, we tend to see it through, and do what it requires to resolve all there is to it.

We prefer to live our way, create our own plan, but time and again in our lives we find this comes to no good nor does it deliver any benefit. It just seems to complicate our lives more. In my case, and I use it as my example of this, I did not see the plan until I was at the senior point doing an evaluation and assessment. It was while I was writing a memoir of my life.

The memoir was not purposeful in evaluating my life. I only realized its poignancy when I finished. My purpose of writing a memoir was part of a family genealogy project I had worked on for many years. It was written for my descendants, to give them a record of my life and times, should they have an interest. As I got into it I found I was plumbing deeper. I was asking “What has it been all about?”

I didn’t expect an answer. I nevertheless received one. It was in this I learned of a supervening plan operating in my life. In the memoir I wrote of this describing my conclusion as follows:

I believe that things happen according to a plan. Whose plan? I do not know. My plan set in this lifetime it is not! Whether it is mine devised somewhere else, the plan of my higher power, or what, I have no idea. It is a plan followed by me in spite of me, taking me often into places and directions I would rather not be.  Much of it has been painful. As I learned with my Alcoholism, learned before recovery and learned after recovery, I am the better person for having experienced where I have been taken. It all turned out as it ought to have. 

All of the events have tied together in a definite pattern. I can see this now, realizing it retrospectively. It is seen in the serenity of my senior years which have been one of the best things about growing old. I no longer have challenges to meet, I have met them and my serenity is the result.

Taking all of what had seemed to be a chaotic series of unrelated events in my life, I started seeing an order to it. More than that I saw its purpose, why I went through these events kicking and screaming most of the way through.

Where they got me was this: Looking at the results I would not trade these for anything I initially had sought or wished to achieve. In spite of the anguish involved in confronting each event, its end product was worth what I went through. I could write pages of instances but this would bore the reader to death.

The one instance I will give is as I wrote in my book From AA to AD, a Wistful Travelogue. 

The book is obtainable at Amazon, simply click on the title.

37 years ago I realized I could not control my daily drinking and the drinking was ruining my life. Worse than that it was ruining the life of my wife and 3 children. I entered Alcoholics Anonymous (AA) and there found my epiphany. I learned to become sober I had to take my drinking and turn it over to my higher power and only that would bring me abstinence and sobriety.

I did, it did, and I have remained sober every day since that time. The gift was my sobriety. There was more than this one gift and that is where my epiphany showed itself the most. I found a way of life that was superior to anything I had ever dreamed of.

To quit drinking and to live life more appropriately I had to give up “My Way” and turn the Way over to my higher power to set the path. As I learned in so many events of my life ever since was this: The extent that I “Turned it over to my higher power,” gave it up myself, any task I faced worked out so much better. To turn it over and keep turning it over became a new Way for me to live, and live successfully doing it.

31 years after starting a sober life I encountered another epiphany, my second. The doctor told me I have Alzheimer’s Disease (AD). To have this disease devastated me. It did and then as quickly my AA tools kicked in and I started to process this turning it over to my higher power. This made AD tolerable to the point that I could see having it as the same type of gift as having Alcoholism. The devastating circumstance of the intrusion of both diseases into my life gave me options I would not have had without them.

Very quickly in turning it over I came to the decision to do everything in my power to help others by having this disease. With a blessing my cognition was preserved enough allowing me to read, analyze and to write about my experience. I was uniquely positioned with the upheaval my life had dealt with because of Alcoholism learning to cope with it using the tools of AA.

I had these tools to apply to coping with AD. More than the tools to cope I retained the insight to understand what this was all about. I suffered through the years of Alcoholism to know the Way to deal with AD. When AD came into my life like a run-a-way truck, I knew what to do with it and how to cope with it.

I used it to do some good, making up for all the good deeds I did not have sufficient time to do in the past. Writing and helping folks understand what this disease is all about and how to deal with the finality of it, which is a slow and tedious in its finality. I hope this has been helpful to at least one person who has suffered as I have.

For me the return is magnificent. Throughout my life with all its pitfalls, failures, with all of its successes which were many, many beyond my wildest dreams, I never found satisfaction from them. Always this void existed. All that I had never relieved this void.

It never relieved until after my diagnosis of AD on June 29^th 2006. I finally found what I was to do with my life. I was to use all that I had learned following this Way the Plan forced on me to share my experience with others to help them. Discovering my purpose in life, embracing it and acting on it I found a portal to something beyond this life transcendent to it.

This seemed to join my material life to the ethereal life that I believe is me that transcends the bounds of time and space, giving meaning to this time in space and all the limitations I have had to deal with.

For all the other good I have tried to do the ultimate good deed of it all was given me. It was the key that lead me to what I was born to do, viz. have this horrid disease and make the best of it.

The subject of this series of essays has been “There Is More Than Meets the Eye in This Life.” The intrusion of a Plan in our lives which foists itself on us is another such thing that affects us deeply and leads us to transcending this life in the end.