I found this and have reproduced some of it - I love the bit about Sobriety being like the true Champagne of life and how anti alcohol warnings never highlight the benefits of not drinking. I hope you enjoy it -here's to an alcohol free weekend.......
I stopped drinking almost 20 years ago, and I sometimes think that my real life began on that day in 1991. Getting sober was one of the best things I ever did, and, strangely, one of the most liberating. Drinking was one of the worst things I did, and I did it continuously and abusively from the age of 18 into my late 40s.
It's obvious that alcohol can enhance pleasure and conviviality, taken moderately; it can also bring people together in a warm and supportive way. But for many who drift into problem boozing, alcohol represents a trail of disasters, a ghastly series of flashback of bad memories, horrible embarrassments and near-lethal experiences.
Many of the campaigns against alcohol focus on the damage that it can do ? that it harms your liver, can be a factor in throat and bladder cancers, and wrecks your personal and professional life. All this is true, but it's emphasising the negative: what about stressing the joy of sobriety?
I once thought that life couldn't be fully experienced without alcohol: but the truth is the opposite ? life can be more fully experienced without alcohol. Drunkenness deadens experience: it renders delight oblivious and pleasure dull.
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Sobriety is the true champagne ? bringing everything into focus in clear colour and full recall. One of the strangest things that happened to me after I started getting sober was that I had this intense sensation of colour all around me. The colours of life became so heightened.
We seem to be so nagged at and scolded about so many health and safety issues that I am not sure if gloomy warnings about the health dangers of alcohol are all that effective. Two things clearly help: increase the price of dirt-cheap supermarket alcohol, and emphasise the pleasures of sobriety.
[/I]Searching for a birthday card, recently, for a young relation who was turning 21, I was hard put to find any greetings card aimed at young men which didn't emphasise the glory of getting pissed. But getting pissed isn't glorious: it's shaming. It is life, fully savoured, fully aware, that is the glorious intoxicant.
I stopped drinking almost 20 years ago, and I sometimes think that my real life began on that day in 1991. Getting sober was one of the best things I ever did, and, strangely, one of the most liberating. Drinking was one of the worst things I did, and I did it continuously and abusively from the age of 18 into my late 40s.
It's obvious that alcohol can enhance pleasure and conviviality, taken moderately; it can also bring people together in a warm and supportive way. But for many who drift into problem boozing, alcohol represents a trail of disasters, a ghastly series of flashback of bad memories, horrible embarrassments and near-lethal experiences.
Many of the campaigns against alcohol focus on the damage that it can do ? that it harms your liver, can be a factor in throat and bladder cancers, and wrecks your personal and professional life. All this is true, but it's emphasising the negative: what about stressing the joy of sobriety?
I once thought that life couldn't be fully experienced without alcohol: but the truth is the opposite ? life can be more fully experienced without alcohol. Drunkenness deadens experience: it renders delight oblivious and pleasure dull.
[/I]
Sobriety is the true champagne ? bringing everything into focus in clear colour and full recall. One of the strangest things that happened to me after I started getting sober was that I had this intense sensation of colour all around me. The colours of life became so heightened.
We seem to be so nagged at and scolded about so many health and safety issues that I am not sure if gloomy warnings about the health dangers of alcohol are all that effective. Two things clearly help: increase the price of dirt-cheap supermarket alcohol, and emphasise the pleasures of sobriety.
[/I]Searching for a birthday card, recently, for a young relation who was turning 21, I was hard put to find any greetings card aimed at young men which didn't emphasise the glory of getting pissed. But getting pissed isn't glorious: it's shaming. It is life, fully savoured, fully aware, that is the glorious intoxicant.
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