Forty Years of Remembering Love
Forty years later, I understand: I was never really searching for sobriety. I was searching for love, and learning to remember it.
Forty years ago today, I put down alcohol and drugs.
At the time, I thought I was giving something up. Looking back, I can see that I was beginning a long journey home.
The years that followed were not always easy. There were seasons of great pain and seasons of great grace. There were times when I walked in darkness, unable to see the path ahead, guided only by a faint longing for something I could not yet name. Again and again, I found myself brought to a place of surrender. Not surrender to an idea, a doctrine, or a belief, but surrender to love itself.
Love became the wall against which I finally stopped struggling.
When life became too heavy to carry, when grief, fear, shame, or loneliness overwhelmed me, I learned to lay my suffering at the feet of love. Not once, but thousands of times. Sometimes willingly. Sometimes because I had exhausted every other possibility.
Over the years, something unexpected happened. The compassion I had spent so much of my life seeking from the world began to arise from within. Not self-indulgence. Not self-pity. Simply a quiet and growing tenderness toward the wounded human being I had been and, in many ways, still am.
And from that compassion for myself came a deeper compassion for all of us.
Today, when I think of addiction, I see something different than I once did. Beneath every dependency, beneath every grasping after substances, possessions, relationships, achievements, or distractions, I sense the same longing. A longing to come home. A longing to find peace. A longing to remember the field of love from which we have never truly been separate.
We search for what we believe is missing.
We reach for something outside ourselves, hoping it will quiet the ache within.
Yet what we are seeking is often closer than our own breath.
Like someone standing in a meadow of buttercups and daisies searching desperately for the meadow itself, we forget where we already are.
The journey has been long.
And it is not over.
Life continues to teach me, humble me, and invite me deeper. But these days the movement feels less like seeking and more like sharing. Less like trying to find love and more like offering the love that has been quietly growing within me all along.
If there is any wisdom these forty years have given me, it is this:
Love was never absent.
Only forgotten.
And perhaps the work of a lifetime is not to acquire anything new, but simply to remember, and then to help one another remember as well.
Nigel Lott teaandzen.org
Meditation Sans Frontieres 501 (C) 3 Non Profit Registered Charity TAX EIN 81-3411835
May the work offered here serve peace, serve healing, serve remembrance, and serve the quiet dignity of being alive. May this sanctuary belong not to one person alone, but to the field of life itself.
And may all who encounter it feel, even for a moment, that nothing is missing and they are not alone.
TEA AND ZEN