Some of you already know that while I am a militant agnostic (I don’t know whether any god exists and neither does anybloodyone else) my beloved mr tog is a regular churchgoer. He wasn’t when we met, it crept up on him. As the Sydney Anglican diocese has not yet been entirely taken over by strictly doctrinaire Paulinists, and he enjoys the musical side of worship (he plays piano and organ) as much if not more than the theological, we manage to rub along fairly well. At the very least I guess the kids will make up their own mind, having both belief and unbelief models to follow.
Since the Anglican church does not expect congregants to observe Lent other than by attending services, and I couldn’t give a monkeys if it did, really, it may seem odd that we decided to follow the tradition of giving something up for the period of Lent this year. As an autodidact scholar of history, mythology and comparative theology, I’m well aware of the power of tying a course of action to an established ritual. The idea of “giving it up for Lent” has an emotional power accreted over centuries of tradition. The extra emotional weight could be a significant advantage in sticking to a plan.
We decided to give up alcohol.
Over the last few years we’d gone from enjoying wine with meals maybe 3 nights a week, to having wine with our meal nearly every night. If we just shared a bottle of wine that would be right on the recommended limit of 14 drinks a week, but that’s an upper limit, remember? And we often had nightcaps, and rarely only one either. On the weekend we would sometimes kick it off with an aperitif as well.
All in all, although we weren’t getting totally squiffed all that often, by the time we added up we were getting on for well over double the recommended two units per night averaged over the week. We decided we needed to break the habit.
In order to make it more likely that we would stick with the regimen for the full forty days, we decided to allow ourselves two wine nights per week, but spirits are verboten. Just wine with meals.
So what’s been the result? Now that we’re in the third week?
Both of us have more energy, more alertness and feel generally more happy. I felt the benefit within a few days, mr tog took longer. For the first two weeks we both felt the occasional craving, but that’s mostly passed.
We’re sleeping better, and we’ve both stopped snoring. The loss of the need for one of us to shift to the spare room to get away from the other’s rumble has been most pleasant. (We had a great pattern going – he’d snore from bedtime till about 1am, then I’d start snoring about 3 or 4am. Restful, eh?)
Both of us are finding our clothes are looser. We don’t have scales in the house because they are the tool of the insecurity-imps, but his belt has gone in a few notches, as has mine. This last weekend I noticed that a blouse I wore a few weeks ago which was very tight in the sleeves around the upper arm then was now quite loose.
We’re both more alert.
We’re both more cheerful.
And only having two wine nights a week means we make an extra-effort: we go the gourmet. This is good. mr tog makes a mean chili con carne, and now that the cooler autumn weather has come in, I shall this weekend be making Beef Wellington. Yummo.
Categories: relationships, religion
We need a new Christmas Carol story 
Thought of the day: when does bigotry occur? 
Things to make you go [insert name here] SMASH! 
Hoyden About Town 
Oh you are both doomed. The Devil Drink shall find you and set you both back on the straight and narrow.
I’m surprised DD hasn’t dropped round yet.
1:02am, eh? New bub needed settling? Give her a hug from Auntie Viv.
At the moment mum and bub are still in hospital. I’m spending mornings and afternoons/evenings there and then coming home to reassure the cat all is well and to forget to feed to fish.
But all is going well.
If I only had the will power to substitute chocolate where you say alcohol, I’m sure all of the above would be true for me too. I’m just going to have to stop whining and do it, aren’t I?
I have to say, the results have been so striking that we’re discussing extending the experiment beyond Easter.
I only crave chocolate for about three days a month, so I can’t specifically relate, however if it’s bothering you you should give it a go. If it’s not really bothering you, meh.
It’s all the wobbly bits that come with eating too much chocolate that are bothering me. Chocolate itself doesn’t bother me at all, more’s the pity!
Hmmm…I was going to say giving up the drink! That’s pretty big! Then I thought, it’s probably one of those things that once you’ve quit it, you’ll wonder why you bothered with it in the first place.
Typical single-woman style, I don’t drink much by myself but often have a big binge on Friday night — which I live to regret for at least Saturday.
I’m a militant agnostic too. Glad to meet another. I think it’s the only realistic perspective on things, hedging a bet either way and living with ambivalence and ambiguity.
Interestingly, I’m finding that having two drinking nights in a row (Friday and Saturday) is not great. I really feel the difference on Sunday mornings. We may have to spread the wine-nights further apart. We do have an extensive cellar, and we love our single-malts, so I don’t think we’ll ever give up the grog entirely.
As to militant agnosticism, I do understand why some people are really uncomfortable with ambivalence and ambiguity – I occasionally have Deistic yearnings myself, although Theism of any stripe I find simply unconvincing, so I’m a-theistic and a-gnostic. I’ve found embracing ambivalence and ambiguity quite exhilarating, once I got used to it.
On a tangent, I relate an experience that taught me a lot about ‘giving up’ things in case it may be helpful to someone who has a dependency.
Round about April/May 1979 I told lots of friends and family that I wouild never smoke another cigarette after 20 July 1979. I was then smoking 25-30 a day. When 20 July came I stubbed out the last one and that was it. I didn’t ‘cut down’ or use patches or eat mints. I just stopped.
I had deliberately engineered the situation so that the shame and embarrassment of failing in front of those whose esteem mattered to me would have been worse than any craving I might have felt. But here’s the funny thing – there was no craving. I had ‘tried’ to give up smoking many times and I suffered, or at least imagined I suffered, cravings. But when I actually did it – nothing. I just became a non-smoker and as a non-smoker I didn’t (and don’t) need cigarettes.
So if you have a fixation on something and you would rather be free of it, just set a date, tell your friends and make it clear that it’s forever and then just do it. You may surprise yourself at how ‘strong’ you are.
PS I don’t mean to make light of addiction and I realise that one sample point does not prove anything. I’m just saying what worked for me. It *may* work for others.