My favorite running route takes me across five bridges, including four that carry me over rivers. Each day, the water below is different than the day before, and not at all what it will be tomorrow. When one day it is rushing and spilling over the banks, the next it is still. It is then when I notice rocks emerging from calm waters.
While Swenny was away at the sober house, many of the messages we exchanged involved lessons learned from water. Lately on runs, I find myself recalling my favorites, including this one from Norman Maclean:
All things merge into one, and a river runs through it…
Swenny’s and my existence remains centered on a search – at times desperate – for sobriety. Days, months and years have merged into the life we have built, and a river runs through it. And that river is alcoholism.
At times it is consuming and we find it a challenge to not get swept away in its unrelenting current. Sometimes, though, it retreats. That is when we walk onto its banks for a closer look before it rises again.
Intensive outpatient therapy has presented a bank upon which to explore what lies beneath the alcoholism running through our lives. While Swenny navigates his recovery by stepping from one rock to another, I find myself still standing on the bank…looking for my rock, reminded that like Maclean, I am haunted by waters.
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