Weekly Insight
For years my same path was drinking. Same time of day, same routine, same way of ending the evening. I knew how every night would go, and that felt like control. Looking back, the evening was running me.
When I stepped off it, I had no idea if I’d be okay (probably why it took so long to commit to a full year). There was no one who could promise certainty. The honest answer at the start was maybe.
What I learned is that you don’t get the answer before the step. You get it after. One evening went fine. Then another. Each one was a small piece of evidence that I could trust myself on ground I didn’t know yet.
Steve Munro talks about this on this week’s episode. He calls it map and territory. The map is the life you think you’re living. The territory is where you’re actually standing. When the two stop matching, he writes a new map. He’s done it five times in 33 years of sobriety.
It applies to more than drinking. A job you’ve outgrown. A city. A way of working that used to fit.
Take the next step. You’re still standing.
Maybe is enough to start.
Podcast
Steve Munro 🇨🇦 spent 25 years drinking, using, and selling drugs. The bottom that finally stuck was a seizure on his apartment floor after walking through the DTs to buy a bottle of vodka. He lived in a residential treatment center for 11 months after that.
He’s 33 years sober now, 71, and living in rural Thailand. In between, he worked as a software executive, raced vintage motorcycles, and ran a business building $100,000 race bikes. Then he sold it all off in two weeks once he saw it had swallowed who he was.
Most of our conversation was about something he calls the Expansion Paradox. Getting sober gives you a bigger life, and nobody hands you the tools to carry it. He found his on a racetrack, in Keith Code’s books on why speed feels terrifying: your brain can’t process information as fast as it’s coming at you. So you drop every input that doesn’t matter and look where you’re going next.
He uses the same idea to check himself. “Map” is the life you think you’re building. “Territory” is where you’re actually standing. When the two drift apart, he writes a new map.
“It’s the difference between focus and obsession. Only you know when you step over the line.”
You can listen on Spotify and Apple Podcasts as well.
My guest this week is with Dr. Lucy McBride on October 8 at 4:30P ET
Most of us judge our drinking by the number. A glass or two most evenings, a little more on weekends, never in the morning. On paper it looks fine, and plenty of doctors would sign off on it.
Dr. Lucy McBride has been a primary care physician in Washington, DC for 25 years, and she asks her patients different questions: when they drink, how, and why. In her new book, Beyond the Prescription, she writes about patients whose evening wine never came close to a diagnosis but still showed up in their sleep, their anxiety and their lab work. One of them told her, “I didn’t realize how much my evening wine was affecting me until I stopped.”
Lucy has been through some of this herself. After a month without alcohol, she wrote, “Suddenly, decompressing at the end of the day required effort.”
That’s what I want to dig into this week. If you push hard and make things, your output depends on how well you recover from the push: sleep, mood, focus, and the steadiness to show up again tomorrow. Alcohol borrows from all of those, and the cost is easy to blame on being busy or getting older.
Before the episode, look back at the mornings you blamed on a lack of discipline. Some of them may have more to do with the night before.
The Clear Hour is this Tuesday, October 6, 11am ET.
On Tuesday I’ll have my camera in hand with a macro lens on it. I don’t have a set idea of what to shoot. The plan is one image: capture it, edit it, and show it off at the end. What I love about macro photography is finding what I can't see with my own eyes.
If you want to see where this kind of work has gone before, my macro collections are here.
Bring whatever you’re making. Ten minutes to arrive, thirty-five to work with cameras on and mics off, and fifteen at the end to share what came of it. Free for subscribers, and the link goes out Tuesday morning.
Reply and let me know you’re coming.