Panicked, frightened, confused, and furious, I called my Al-Anon sponsor. My sixteen-year-old daughter had just stormed out of the house in a rage. I don’t remember the inciting incident. I just remember what I felt: worry, anger, fear, and everything in between.
An onslaught of spiraling questions crowded my thoughts.
What if she doesn’t come home before her curfew? What other consequences can I put in place? What if she doesn’t come home at all? Should I call the police? When do you call the police? If she does come home, what should I do? What if she refuses to go to school tomorrow? Where is she?
My heart raced. I paced the floor, trying to piece a plan together.
I had begun attending Al-Anon meetings to learn how to mange my daughter and leverage control over the drug abuse. Al-Anon didn’t teach me how to manage someone else. It taught me how to manage myself and find serenity despite other other people’s actions.
Al-Anon also taught me to reach out to another Al-Anon member. Anytime.
So I called my sponsor and unleashed my questions. In a calm voice, she said, “Why are you spending your energy worrying about this? What’s that getting you? You’re planning for possibilities when you don’t know if any of the scenarios will occur.”
She continued with her own experience, strength, and hope.
When I start to worry about things that might happen, I dive into making Plans A, B, and C. But usually something else happens, and my plans don’t fit. All that planning and worrying just wore me out. And for what? I sure don’t feel any better. I’ve learned that the best thing I can do is to just stay in the present. Stay where my feet are. That’s all I really know.
I don’t know what the future’s going to bring, but I do know what’s right in front of me. And that’s where I can do something. Wherever my feet are, that’s where I am. That’s the only place I can do anything. So, I just do the next right thing. If I’ve got laundry to fold or bills to pay, then that’s what I do, Then I do the next thing, then the next right thing.
Do the next right thing. It was a handhold in the moment. Those five words pulled me back from the edge. “Do the next right thing” wasn’t the advice I wanted, but it was what I needed.
What was the next right thing? Something concrete and actionable. I don’t remember whether I fed the dog or fixed dinner. Sure, the worry and fear didn’t evaporate with my next breath. But as I put energy into doing something concrete, right in front of me, the worry and fear began to subside. Each decision to do the next right thing ushered me closer to serenity: To accept the things I cannot change, change the things I can, and have the wisdom to know the difference.
“Do the next right thing” has become a personal operating principle. It guides my choices when the to-do list tumbles off the page. It directs me when I can’t get my act together for the afternoon. It hits the thaw button when I’m frozen and overwhelmed.
Sometimes scouring the sink or pulling weeds is the next right thing. Sometimes it’s sitting down and responding to emails or drafting a new blog entry.
The magic is that after I do that next right thing, I move ahead and do the next thing, then the next thing. Before long I’ve stepped out of the slump, cleared away the overwhelm, or let go of that bag of worry.
And as we say in Al-Anon, “The opinions expressed here were strictly those of the person who gave them. Take what you like and leave the rest.”