Post: #1901

scubadude, thank you for this post. To say that it gratifies me to read it would be to say very little.

Welcome back aboard for year 3 as of May 3, 2017 and I look forward to hearing more from you on this thread as time goes on.

Post: #1902

I must chime in here. I've been almost dry for a good six months, and my life has improved immeasurably. I've had a glass of wine or pint of cider on maybe half a dozen occasions, and all but one of those were in a mini relationship which turned out to be a touch stressful. So possibly the alcohol consumption was symptomatic of underlying causes. Looking back, I'm convinced that if I had been regularly drinking I might have slipped way further.

Huge benefits I've noticed are that my sleep is better quality, I wake at the right time, if I'm partying I can go on much longer without falling asleep, and my instrument playing abilities have improved in real terms especially playing in front of people.

I got my coffee consumption down to a more acceptable level recently, but it crept up last few weeks and exponentially with a festival over the weekend. So that's this week's project.

Post: #1903

Today marks the completion of 3 years on the wagon. Truthfully, it is hard to believe so much time has passed without a drink. I found Year 3 to be a very easy year, as I had basically zero thoughts of drinking. Even with Trump winning the election, which was one of the greatest causes for celebration in recent memory, I didn’t consider a victory drink. Instead, I smoked a couple cigars with my friends and that to me was a perfect way of marking the occasion.

Enough time has gone since stopping drinking that I can look back on where I was 3 years ago and see the benefits the wagon has given me. I am very grateful for quitting. My life is better by every metric, and in particular my physical health has really improved as I am now exercising 4- 5 times a week. The high I get from rigorous exercise is something I find myself addicted to; and I think my past as a drinker probably makes me more disposed to need exercise for that extra dopamine and serotonin kick. Removing the habit of drinking and replacing it with the habit of exercise is an amazingly natural and fitting transition that I would encourage all guys on the wagon to do.

Ready for another positive year as I will be signing up for year 4 on the wagon.

Post: #1904

bacon, that's truly great to hear. Three years is a big deal.

I think back to the very beginning of this thread, and what a bitterly hard drinker you were then. And here you are after 3 full years on the wagon, your life immeasurably better in every way. It's a beautiful thought and reality.

Welcome back aboard for year 4 as of May 20, 2017 and I look forward to hearing more from you here as time goes on.

Post: #1905

Yesterday passed by marking 3 years on the wagon of no drinking and I didn't even notice.

Bacon's post echos my own sentiments and I'll add, I know my life would be much different now if I had never picked up the bottle in ways that actually leave me a bit sad if I think about it too much.

I love some of the adventures I had, but they were not worth all the troubles I caused myself or the opportunities I missed.

I can't believe I actually used to think it was cool the way I used to carry on.

I have taken up smoking marijuana in the evenings before I go to bed and finally have been sleeping deeply and better than I have in years.

I don't have any sort of hangover but feel pretty well rested.

If any signs of negativity in my life show up from it I'll stop.

I drink too much coffee still but it's down less than it was.

I moved from Vegas to Phoenix to start work at a new company and have been working 12 hour days that I actually enjoy.

Its a growing company thats excellently positioned in a burgeoning industry so I think there is a lot of potential.

I get along with everyone I work with and I'm well liked. No one believes my real age.

I have been here a month and have banged a 21 year old and 22 year old hottie with a lot in the pipeline and more all the time. I have noticed most women are very impressed I don't drink.

My child support/custody drama has been settled in terms that are favorable to me.

Honestly I sense some of my best years ahead.

I can feel it.

I'm renewing the no drinking challenge for another year.

I'm far better without it.

Post: #1906

Fisto, so happy to read this post. The good years -- the wagon years -- just keep adding up.

Please be careful with the pot -- that stuff sneaks up on you, it's never quite as harmless as it seems. Some people's brains take to substances of every kind all too readily and unfortunately they are precisely the ones who would be well advised to avoid them at all costs. Just how it is, so one might as well accept it.

Welcome back aboard for year 4 as of May 24, 2017 and I hope to hear more from you here over time.

Post: #1907

I'm going full Morman as of tomorrow.

Post: #1908

I'm not looking to give up drinking for a year (at present) but have read the thread for a while after reflecting on my relationship with alcohol as a heavy drinker.

I think it's really interesting what you guys are doing.

I decided to abstain for a while as I haven't been happy with how my life is going and feel the need to change something and in doing so see who I become without it.
I haven't had a drop in over two weeks and went out on Friday night to a social event/network evening which is held in a different bar each month. In the lead up to the event and throughout the night I monitored how I felt without alcohol and I believe at each stage it was a lot better.

It was pretty funny to recognise that people were getting more and more inebriated, out of control and embarrassing themselves as the night wore on.

Despite it being quite a late night I still felt pretty good the following day and checked in with a few friends to see how they were.
They were all sick or hungover and unproductive.

Post: #1909

Good evening gents.

Checking in at one year and 4 months on this official wagon, maybe 20 months unofficially.

I've noticed a sense of calm come over me recently. It's a kind of serenity as I go through my life, a feeling of being in complete control and mastery of the chaos around me.

I've recently had a child so maybe 5 months of that has had an effect on my patience levels in generally dealing with the rest of what's going on outside of that but the two don't really feel that related.

The best way to describe it would be as if I'm looking out from behind my own eyes, as if operating a machine or being on the bridge of a big ship. I instinctively know what to do in any given situation and the best course of action. My interactions with other people, I can turn to my advantage when and how I want and I consistently make good decisions.

Another element to this is recognising opportunities when they come along. In the old days I would often only realise that I had missed an opportunity when a few days had passed. Now, I intuitively know when an opportunity has come along and when to act on it.

Today for example, a seemingly chance encounter meant that something I could have deferred to another day (getting the contact details of someone important I needed through someone else) I felt that I needed to push at that moment. I pushed and got the details I needed. Then usually, I may have sat on those details until I had a moment to call but something said to me 'call now. Now is the time'. I got through right then and had a potentially very profitable conversation with that guy.

This may just be how other people are but I can't shake this feeling of serenity and intuition. It's a heady mix, especially when I look around and see the people around me wasting their life with the consequences of the shit decisions that alcohol brings.

Does anyone else feel this? LOZ - is this one of the deep benefits of the wagon that you speak so often of?

Post: #1910

Ski pro, the sense of confidence, control, and invincibility that you are describing is most reliably conferred by the administration of high quality cocaine in powder form. Are you sure the Alpine peaks are the only kind of snow you're gliding through?

In all seriousness, what you are speaking about is simply how a man feels when he is happy and his life is humming in that special even way that only sustained happiness brings. This is a precious feeling and I hope you enjoy it for as long as it lasts.

Such times of happiness and serenity are rare -- rare even in a great life; it is the nature of the rhythm of life that it consists of different periods and parts, and periods that are filled with the special buzz of happiness can give way to others that are filled with frustration and struggle, or simply with the variable fortunes of the day-to-day. It is futile to wish for a life of nothing but happiness, or even to try to hold on to the feeling; one cherishes it while it's there as a gift from the gods, and one looks back on it fondly later on, knowing that most of life is spent neither in unalloyed serenity nor in unadulterated misery, but somewhere between those poles of human experience.

What the wagon has done is that it has made such a period possible for you. The life of a drunk is, after a while, a life of darkness, and the hum of confidence and flow is not a sound that the drunk can hear in his coarsened and degraded state. By getting on the wagon and staying on it, your life has become open to possibility, and happiness is one of the possibilities of life, one of the aspects it can wear for as long as it pleases fortune. The wagon does not vouchsafe happiness, but it frees you from a terrible world in which it is foreclosed. It permits life to take on a variety of hues and casts, some brighter and some less so, but all absent from the film noir black-and-white in which the drunkard plies his increasingly desperate trade.

When I speak of the other and subtle benefits of the wagon, though, I have something different in mind. I mean something that is both deeper and less flamboyant than happiness, something that need not come to the surface at all as emotion, and yet over time and by very slow and imperceptible degrees confers on a life a depth and richness that no mere happiness can give. The best way I know to describe it is as a modest openness to the objective reality outside oneself, a default mild attentiveness to the world as it really is and all its seemingly mundane and unglamorous aspects. It is something that proceeds from thought more than feeling, but thought so fleeting that it can barely be caught and characterized. But it is this accumulation, over time, of moments of sidelong attention to seemingly insignificant detail of no import to one's self and one's life that gives a man what can only be called love of the world.

Happiness and misery are both selfish and self-involved; but the wagoneer often finds himself with nothing much to do and time on his hands in the vast, flat, and seemingly nondescript valley that stretches between these two peaks. It's in those long passages where one's attention is not ordained to be directed at anything in particular that the eye can, by dint of little more than boredom and exasperation, turn away from one's own all too familiar dealings and linger for a moment just a little longer than usual on some small feature of the landscape outside the self.

Something happens at a moment like that, or it can -- and after a while, these sidelong moments can become a habit of the mind that finds in them a strange nourishment nothing else can provide. It -- the mind -- becomes dissatisfied with the stale feasts of the self and their gussied-up monotony, and it seeks the plain fare of everyday life outside the self because in all its modesty it is so filled with every life-giving mineral that helps the mind grow and be refreshed. It comes to crave it like a man might crave one of those leafy greens that taste so coarse and bitter to the spoiled child's innocently depraved palate, but that one grows in maturity to seek and privilege over all the sweets in the world because one senses the richness of the ore that their slight metallic taste bespeaks.

This opening of the mind, this turn to the life outside the self for nourishment and sustenance, is what I really mean when I sometimes talk of the wagon's deeper and subtler benefits. It is not something that can be willed or sought, and it comes into a life by a series of accidents of thought and attention that cannot be hastened. All you can do is let the wagon roll on, and occasionally look out the window, whatever your life's weather may be; and over time you might find that the view has come to mean more to you than you ever thought possible.

Post: #1911

delete