One of the things about living a while (sober or not - you just notice more if you're sober and go to a lot of meetings) are the various bandwagons that run through our culture. These are often expressed as sayings that come from the business world ("the bottom line is..."), the sports world ("step up to the plate..."), TV ads ("...the beef...") or popular psychology and religion ("*inner child*").It seems like there the one I've been noticing around here in meetings and in the vernacular (it's even in today's comics!) is the phrase:
"It is what it is..."The urban dictionary indicates this phrase has been around and popular for a number of years (USA Today named it the the #1 cliche of 2004) but this drunk is not always the quickest on the block. I just really started to get tired of it in the past few weeks...
As I heard a new sponsee sort of go on a riff around "it is what it is" last night, I realized how sometimes we toss a phrase like this out as so much flash powder sprinkled in conversation so that we don't really have to get honest about what's going on in our life and our feelings about it. I called him on it (gently, of course ;-) ) and we got to the selfishness and fear that was underneath those events that were bugging him in early sobriety. He lived through it and might have learned something. At 40 days sober, probably not...
...because, as we all know, it is what it is...
Lovely...
4 comments:
Yeah, well, of course, it's not what it's not.
Yep, that phrase helped me a lot especially in early sobriety. It still does, along with it's companion, it will be what it's gonna be.
Oh dear. There are so many cliches that get on my last nerve. I wrote a paper (for school) once on linguistic determinism... that how we say things really affects the way we feel about them and the way we act.
I prefer the PopEye version of "I yam what I yam". Sometimes the cliches come out without thinking...I believe that I don't have to settle for it is what it is--I can do better than that if I turn my will and life over to my Higher Power.
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