The Process

I miss my time as a high school football coach. 

The game has taught me too many lessons to put in some list for you. Many of the lessons though—hard work and dedication for example—are habits that allow this blog to continue. 

One thing that has stuck with me is the notion of the process.

In football, when installing an offense, that means you install the system three times before you begin playing games. Once in the winter, in the classroom. Then on the field in the spring. By the time August comes around, the players should be learning the offense for a third time.

But in order to be great, students needed to want to be there for each installment. “Trust the process,” we’d tell them. This means that if you don’t understand some run concept in the classroom in the winter, keep trying and maybe when we are on the field in the spring you’ll get it. Or, maybe you just need to put pads on in August for the game to come to you. In my 8 years coaching, I saw it over and over. The players that trusted the process—the ones who showed up because they wanted to and took instruction in a simple and straightforward way—were always our success stories. These are players that went on to Division One scholarships, and for a few, NFL careers. 

This is a great lesson in life. 

I think it applies to life. At least, I’m sure it applies to recovery. What a process that is, recovery. 

Trusting the process is central to 12-step groups and their mantra of “keep coming back.” The guiding principles of sober life didn’t come to me over night. I had to continue to do the things that people suggested I do. I took the suggestions—I prayed, I went to meetings, I shared, I read the literature, I made sober friends, I found sober hobbies, I avoided those too familiar places and people that could get me in trouble, I reached out for help as best I could—without the certainty that these things could work. It’s like the quote credited to Dr. King, “Faith is taking the first step when you can’t see the entire staircase.” Trust the process. 

I was desperate; I had lost my will to live. And here were these people. Their stories were similar to mine. I’ve since learned to stop thinking of people’s stories as “worse” or “better” than mine, but at the time, that’s what I was thinking. Man, I didn’t think it could be worse. And these people were sober, laughing about how they ruined their lives in their addictions. 

“So how do I get to the point where I can laugh about going insane and losing the will to live?”

“Trust the process. Do the things that worked for us.”

The great recovery adage holds: If you want the things that sober and confident people have, you should do the things they do to get them.

In recovery, this transforms and circulates once you’ve attained that sober confidence you so admired early on. There is no resting on the mountain top to enjoy the view. You’ve got to hike back down to the foothills and find another journeyman. It’s why they say: you can’t give away something you don’t have. You’ve got to stake your own path up the mountain before you can show someone else the way.

All those slogans, those quips about life that get laminated and framed on the walls of Alano clubs are usually spot on. And if you trust the process, you will survive long enough to understand why.

I am years into trusting the process of publishing. 

This needs some clarity. I’m not sure that process is too trustworthy. What I trust is my fellow writers who are on the journey with me. The ones who face constant rejection, but keep submitting anyway. It is a powerful thing to face that kind of rejection and remain sure about what you came here to do. 

I haven’t reached my destination in this arena. Never published a book. I’m on some step of that dark staircase, moving one foot at a time. But I trust and believe that, one day, I will look back down the way I came and enumerate all the steps I’ve taken to get there.

Of course, the process can be difficult. 

We began the process of grief we are currently in when my wife got the call in August that her dad would have to begin his chemotherapy as soon as possible. He passed last week, surrounded by loved ones. The last thing he heard were the many expressions of love from those closest to him, including my wife, his only daughter.

We’re too close to that moment to see it as beautiful. One day, the beauty buried within the sadness might bloom, but for now it’s just tragic. He was too young—his life still filled with so much promise.

My son loves his grandpa very much. Whether it is my son’s fascination with guns and cowboys, his love of baseball and motorcycles, his grandfather has left an indelible impression on him—a lifetime one, for sure.

The sadder case is my daughter. She is four. And while her grandpa has made quite an impact on her as well—mainly in the form of chocolate milk, homemade ice cream, and finishing each sip with an “Ahhh”—it is unclear whether these are forever memories stored in her mind.

Saddest yet is our youngest, born only five months ago. It is a virtual certainty that she will have no recollection of her grandfather-in-the-flesh. That sweet daughter of mine—the just beginning to laugh out loud—will never know the man who raised her mother.   

And yet, here is the process. 

It includes remembering and celebrating, but that is all a part of the larger process of mourning. But you trust in the process giving this grief its full rotation. 

So we will remain present and vigilant, weathering each storm as it swells. And we will go to great lengths to never forget the life and legacy of the man who raised my wife.