Chasing Nirvana -- Is the Endless Quest for that Perfect High Doomed?

Blink, Smale Park, 2022, Cincinnati, OH. Dee.

What is it we’re looking for when we over-indulge? 

There’s some feeling that we’re soo close to feeling just right. The perfect moment. The perfect experience. The ecstasy, full sensation and enjoyment and pleasure. One more beer. Just another puff. One more pill. One more cheese puff … 

I know. 

Seeking pleasure, chasing nirvana ... It's baked into us. I'm thinking about holidays or summer vacation as a child. All that anticipation. We that magical sense of “Aha! We're almost there. This is it! And then one of those moments. That feeling of bliss we didn’t even know we were looking for, where everything just feels so GOOOOOD in the moment, a day at the beach, splashing in the ocean. Diving off a raft. An ice cream on the Boardwalk. It felt delicious through and through. And in my memory it was all just one long summer of fun.

But the reality is that I'm remembering the peaks. The moments I want to live in. That moment when we arrived, and all the scenery and activities lay out in front of us, abundant, the delicious anticipation, AND we raced off to the lake or the ocean or the spa, to play or explore or to visit with family, to feel free, with no need to wake up early, no responsibilities -- ah, bliss!

And then after a few days or a week or two, it's over. It can't go on forever. That’s what makes it special. 

Of course we want to be able to capture that sense of pleasure, escape, and feeling good. Who wouldn’t!? We feel alive! We feel free and powerful and in control.

But for most of us, summer vacation only came once a year. And even there it’s easy to pop on our rose-colored sunglasses in remembering these times. Even on the best of travels, I seem to remember a lot of tears sprinkled in there, too -- over-stimulation, arguments, sunburn, real-life intrusions, bickering, parents. :)

Chasing Nirvana -- Are We There Yet?

So was it worth it, those irritations that crept into even the best of our memories? On the vacations, I would say, “Oh yes!” Those annoyances were fleeting, whereas the bonds and shared experiences have lasted a lifetime. 

So, ask yourself what you are really accessing with these little mini-vacations from stress, sadness, anxiety. The last time you had a drink, got high, did you get to that nirvana place? Close? Did you really savor and enjoy it? Was the whole episode pleasing? You woke up feeling good, thinking, "Yeah, that was wonderful?" 

Social Drinking

Now, if you are a person that has lots of happy memories of alcohol incorporated into moderate drinking scenarios, where it just added a little sparkle and wit to the conversation, or loosened people up to be funny or endearing, etc., good conversation over dinner wine or cocktails beforehand … well that kind of social drinking may well be a good goal.

If your realistic imagined scenarios for the future include stopping after a reasonable amount, enjoying the moment, feeling an enhancement of pleasure, openness, warmth … Well, that sounds reasonable. You might set some boundaries for yourself around that, just to make it easier to stay on track. Maybe try to avoid drinking more than X times a week or a month. Think about the circumstances that do and do not lend to enjoyable, healthy drinking or using scenarios.

Heavier Drinking

But what if you’re a person like me, who associated alcohol and drugs with completely letting loose and abandoning myself to getting as high as I could. I wanted to get as close to blackout as I could but not black out. I wanted to feel that high, high, high, without completely tipping over. Do I miss that? Well sure! But there were too many down sides for me. If that’s the only thing left, well, I figure I probably got about as close to nirvana as I’m going to get this side of life.

I don’t believe anymore that there’s some magical, perfect moment of pleasure that I have yet to attain. I’ve found there are surprising pleasures all around me that are not peak in the same way, but have their moments when I pay attention.

So, I think we tend to look at this journey as an all-or-nothing proposition. That’s been drilled into us. The reality is that we wander around in life some. It’s rarely a straight line. I only recently started looking at my WHOLE journey as a sort of epic harm-reduction journey, over the decades now. Wow, that seems glacially slow, though, to finally come to some kind of terms with some things.

Traveling (often Trudging) Through Life

Mushroom mural, Cincinnati, OH. Dee

Or maybe that’s just life, and the way we all work at finding balance, learning to live with ourselves and hopefully others. Feeling at peace with ourselves at the end of the day. For me, it included an addiction journey, but I see it more and more as just a life journey. I spent a lot of time looking in the wrong places for the things I thought I needed.

There are consequences to everything we do, good or bad. And we’re never going to get it perfect, so each of us just tries to find our own way to trundle along best we can. If we ignore consequences, sometimes they catch up to us in bad ways that are much harder to deal with than they need to be. And a lot of bad things don’t come to pass, because here we are. Still alive. Still hanging in there.

I found that I couldn’t incorporate drinking into my life anymore in a way that didn’t cause it to go off the rails. I tried valiantly for a great many years, with a lot of HUGE, terrible stumbles all along the way. It just got harder to wake up, harder to cut it off, harder to want to go to work, harder to take care of myself, harder to stave off depression, harder to care. 

My Personal Moderation and Harm Reduction Attempts

Looking back, over time, I suppose I had reduced in lots of ways. I almost never drank liquor. I stuck to beer, some hard lemonades, at the end. But I had also escalated to round-the-clock, stay drunk all the time kind of drinking. 

I staggered around and worked, but I lost jobs, friendships and apartments, periodically. I let myself fall apart. And then pulled myself back together again over and over. Oh, and I added drugs and terrible relationships in there, too, which of course, made it all worse. But the drinking was definitely always there, underneath.

And when I tried to do it more moderately, it seemed to inevitably build to more and more, more and more daily, etc. So, I finally put down the drinking (again). It wasn’t a big overall plan, but I needed to find some footing and get my health and mind together enough to be able to think a little bit.

I don't believe addiction is a disease, some foreign, bizarre aberration in human beings. I think it’s a coping outlet for the things we all struggle with underneath. Unfortunately, with addiction, its cycles can take over everything else, and become our biggest and certainly most visible problem of the moment.

Support Helps Stops that Chase

Maybe it's time to stop the chase. Castellini clock, Smale Park, Cincinnati, OH. Dee

Addiction can be many-layered, but there are some phases that are not as hard as we may fear. 

1. Getting started -- Finding the desire to make a change in something that has provided comfort, that we WANT to keep in our lives. 

   
   

2. Getting through the early days -- sleep, hydration, reclaiming physical basics and finding some anchors. 

   
   

3. Sustaining and adjusting things for a bit -- long enough to see what some real benefits might be. 

   
   

I think coaching and support can help a lot during each of these, and in thinking about what you might want in life, going forward.

BONUS: Song association: