Turning My Life and My Will Over…to an app.

I was so spiritually bankrupt when I started secretly googling the Twelve Steps, I couldn’t comprehend the God stuff. The wording in the literature I found said “God of my understanding” but I took that to mean they didn’t subscribe to religious discrimination. It sure seemed like you still had to have A Religion and A God. It sunk in after a while that this didn’t have to be an organized religion, and the idea of spirituality seemed more feasible to me. I believed, while vaguely, in some Power greater than myself. I sure didn’t feel powerful and Power seemed to exist, so it wasn’t a huge logical obstacle to say there was a Higher Power. However, how the heck was I to turn my will and my life over to some vague conception, spiritual in nature?

The third step in a twelve step program is “made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God as we understood him.”. I read this as “let Jesus take the wheel.” I was pretty sure Jesus didn’t have a valid drivers license, while, by some luck or miracle, I did. (Thank you, Jesus?) At any rate, I couldn’t imagine turning my life and will — my thoughts and actions — over to the care of anything other than me. Nobody else could possibly do the multi-factor calculations in my complicated mind that arrived at the decisions that I needed to. Besides, a huge theme of this journey into my personal recovery was finding my own voice and embracing my own power, so this entire notion sounded counterproductive.

That, and I didn’t trust in anyone or anything. Faith was a huge step above trust, and I couldn’t even put my foot on that rung of the ladder, much less reach the next one.

I pondered this concept for a while. I wasn’t going to let Jesus chauffeur me around anytime soon, my parents had taught me not to get in the car with strangers. I was more like a student driver, scared out of my mind, moving jerkily through the days just trying to maintain my lane and not die in a fiery crash. I had no bandwidth to read any road signs put out by some Higher Power, listen to my passengers in life give me advice. I was too busy just trying not to wreck and hoping to arrive at my next stop.

With this driving analogy in my head, because that’s how my mind works, I found myself in yet another argument with my spouse on the topic of being late to school. My children were one and two. We had just moved, resulting in the backroad, no traffic, very predictable 12 minute commute to preschool for the older one morphing to a maddening 45 minutes to an hour and 15 minutes with a myriad of potential routes.

I’ve never been a morning person, and these mornings I was usually some degree of hungover. Being a night owl, I found my peaceful moments late at night when everyone else was in bed, and tended to stretch them out and enjoy this solitude, rather than turning in early to get a full night’s sleep. My mornings consisted of wrangling two people still in diapers through a meal, getting them dressed, gathering their supplies for their day, as well as mine, strapping them in the car, and making the difficult choice of which route felt like the one that might possibly get us to school on time. I kept the fledgeling app Waze open on my phone on the counter so I could watch the predicted commute and try to make it out the door before the count signaled doom. Every morning, my blood pressure rose in tandem with the estimated arrival time. We were always one diaper emergency or lost shoe away from disaster.

Keeping my son in this Montessori school was the one decision in my life where I had actually stood my ground when my husband and I were at odds. He would have preferred to switch to a more convenient preschool, preferably one of the ones attended by any of our neighbors and that boasted flashy marketing. I felt strongly about our kids’ education in this regard. I had been a Montessori student, I had even helped get a Montessori school up and running and worked in the environment for years. I had read the books, attended the conferences, pitched prospective parents on the benefits of a Montessori education. I credited my business development ability, critical thinking, creativity, open mindedness, and so much more to my Montessori education. I had argued my point to my husband, carefully citing the references I knew would hit home (Google and Amazon founders that credit their Montessori upbringing, statistics on neuroscience and future outcomes of success), not mentioning the ones that wouldn’t hold weight (the hippy-dippy environment, the vague concept of “learning how to do things well”). This was my choice, and I was standing my ground, consequences and commutes be damned. I had so few things in life that I felt passionately about, this was a big deal for me. For once, I dug my heels in. I was willing to do all of the drop offs and pick ups in order to stick with this school.

So, not long after the move, and the exponential expansion of the commute, I once again balked at Waze and determined that the route it gave me was a terrible choice, because didn’t it know the light on Interstate North Parkway is interminable? I turned right instead because I knew the light was interminable, and I was once again late to school by following my own best judgment. Knowing that when progress reports came out, the number of tardies ( for our two and a half year old, who spent half his day wandering aimlessly about the classroom, what does that five minutes matter?!) would be approaching double digits, I began to feel despair over the shitstorm that would rain down from my husband, and feared that I wouldn’t have the strength to maintain this last stronghold in my life. I would have to send my child to the neighborhood daycare that provided app-based check in and catered meals, in lieu of molding my toddler’s precious brain in ways that I thought were actually important.

One Monday morning, vat of coffee in hand and two yelling children in the backseat, I literally threw up my hands at a traffic light and said “Okay, Waze. Fine, you win. Tell me which way to go and I’ll do it. I’m turning my life and my will over to Waze for the next week, and let’s see where that gets me.”

We were on time every day that week. Five days, five different routes, five different commute times. All ending at 8:41am. The school age children’s carpool dictated we couldn’t arrive before 8:40, but we had to be in the classroom at 8:45, and it took approximately 3 minutes to disembark both children from the car and walk through the lovely campus to my son’s classroom. Barring the dreaded diaper and shoe emergencies that might arise in the car, as they did surprisingly often. We were working on a very tight timeframe, and I put a lot of time and carried a lot of stress trying and failing to get it right, and damned if Waze didn’t do it, when I had failed so many times. I had found a power greater than myself whom I could rely on to get me exactly where I needed to be, when I needed to be there. I had surrendered, and in that surrender, I had won.

Thankfully, I had the wherewithal to know that Waze could not guide all of my thoughts and actions. This was by no means the end of my spiritual journey, but it was the first step in that direction. I now had proof of concept. Maybe…just maybe…there was something or someone or some idea of my understanding — something greater than myself — that I could trust to guide me and take care of me. Maybe I couldn’t (and in fact, shouldn’t) run the whole show.

Sometimes… just sometimes… if I let Jesus and the App Store take the wheel, I might end up where I need to be, when I need to be there. My spiritual journey had to start with one tiny step and listening to one little voice — the one telling me to turn down a different path.

I did eventually back up and actually come to terms with a Higher Power that couldn’t be downloaded to my phone, you can read about that here.