It's OK to be OK

I'm averaging 12-15 miles on the bike each night lately, and there have been some nights when I'm hitting 17-20 mile territory. The weather has turned cooler and the sun goes down a little earlier each evening. It's still too hot during the day to ride (for me, anyway), and even though I'm usually awake by 4AM each morning with the dogs (old dogs, old habits, etc) the morning already has its own routine. So, night rides it is, at least for now.

I usually start around dusk and get home well after dark. The other night I was out for nearly two hours, and by the time I got back to my neighborhood, the streets were quiet.

It's hard to square this with the guy I was just a few years ago. As I've said here before, this ain't no recovery blog -- not because I don't value being sober, but because I'm not willing to be a spokesperson for recovery. I've gone down that path before, enough to know that it's a thankless and precarious place to be. I write about it more in the book, and I'm trying to be as candid as possible about all this -- including the fact that I'm not out here posing as some kind of model of successful recovery. I'm doing well right now, and I'll just leave it at that. 

But here are two thing I can rightly point to as accomplishments I'm proud of: 

For four years I've been committed to quitting alcohol for good, and for the last two of those years I've lived a life free of alcohol. I don't think about it much anymore. That's something I would never have thought impossible just a few years ago.  

And I now get regular daily exercise. When I started riding my bike again, it changed how I think about exercise, that it wasn't about achieving some random goal for me, some target weight or miles per hour, but about fun. Now I miss it if I can't hop on my ride and fly somewhere. 

I'm not exactly a poster child for healthy living, lulz, even with the tai chi and the meditation and the visualization and the group therapy, and the bike. Far from it. I still have plenty of other filthy habits, and hopefully I'll get around to ending those before they get around to ending me.  

But in the meantime, I can honestly say just those two factors -- quitting the booze, and riding the bike -- have changed my life in profound ways. I've never been more mentally stable at any point in my life. I lost 34 lbs and it never came back. My BP stabilized. My bloodwork started coming back normal. I slept through the night again. 

I guess my point is that I don't have to be perfect. It's okay that I'm still a work in progress, and that I have a spotty record, it's okay to still have warts. I can have huge areas of my life that need improvement, and still be really happy and relieved that at least, by gawd, I'm not drunk today.

It's enough to just be okay with being okay.