If you don't drink, you won't die
What will happen is that life will reveal itself as it is.
Depending on your state of mind, it may reveal itself as wonderful or unbearable. As extraordinary or utterly ordinary.
Even if at that moment life is a hell filled with suffering, how you perceive it will make all the difference.
I recently re-posted elsewhere these words from Rilke: "If everyday life seems poor to you, do not blame it: blame yourself for not being poet enough to extract its riches."
We drink because we don't know how to be poets and extract riches from life. Because we can't tolerate its simplicity.
We say: “Everything feels empty. I sense no flavors. Nothing fulfills me.”
It never occurs to us that the problem lies not in the ordinary quality of life, but in how our mind reacts to the truth of reality as it is.
Or perhaps we drink because life sometimes is hell after all. From the moment we open our eyes until we close them. There are times when everything bad that can happen to us, does happen.
"It's too much," we say, and with that, we give ourselves the green light to pour ourselves a drink. And then another. And then another.
The "relief" is immediate. The elixir suspends the heaviness of life and gives color to our black-and-white days in just a few minutes. Little by little, a certain kind of courage arrives and makes us feel invulnerable.
"Let whatever happens, happen. I'm ready for anything."
"Let's conquer the world."
"Let's enjoy life to the fullest."
But this delicious momentum is gradually replaced by a deterioration of our judgment. The antidote slowly makes us redundant, carried away, foolish, and inevitably useless.
It leaves us like dirty rags soaked in liquid incoherence.
And the next day, everything is revealed as it is again, including the consequences of the intoxication of body and soul.
The dead days are revealed. Our absence from the world. Our postponed dreams by our inability to operate.
I'm not even talking about alcoholism. That's a dimension a thousand times more terrible and painful.
I'm talking about the ones who drink because they don't know they're already poets. Their minds already know how to reveal the magic of daily simplicity. They just have to learn to calm down and allow their minds to express their natural awe.
If you don't drink, you won't die.
Or maybe you will, and life will finally reveal itself as it is: challenging, hard, amazing, and supremely blessed.
May you see and experience things as they are. If you don't drink, you won't die.
What will happen is that life will reveal itself as it is.
***Adapt to your anesthesia of choice.