Sunday Serenity

Happy Sunday Cadre Sphere. Jason Lennox here. Happy to be with you for this week's version of Sunday Serenity. Again. My name is Jason Linnux and I'm your resident recovery champion, here to talk about all things recovery from addiction, alcoholism, mental health, and I just love to sprinkle in general well being as well. But Sunday serenity, where does that come from? That's just, I think for me as a person that's in recovery, I think serenity is the most critical component of my recovery. When I'm serene and I have peace, I'm a whole lot less likely to be going back out there and returning to that old lifestyle.

So for me, it was always the chaos and, you know, just that lack of peace and serenity, a lot of which was self inflicted. But that's what, that's what drove me back to drinking into drugs. So I think serenity is so critical not only for recovery, but just in general for people. And sorry, I'm moving around, trying to get out of this light a little bit. Don't know if it's gonna happen. The sun is just setting where I am, actually. Good evening, Speak Wonder. I'm over in your neck of the woods, kind of not Pennsylvania, but I'm in upstate New York, so.

But anyway, Serenity, I think is just critical. And tonight I want to talk a little bit about some experiences I had. I wasn't on last week, as you saw, I was in Hawaii. Not the best service, just a big time difference and just didn't quite adjust to that. But anytime I go on a trip somewhere, actually, anytime I do anything, I went to speak at a treatment center on Thursday. Anytime I have any of these kinds of events or trips or experiences, my eyes and my ears are always peeled for what is the lesson, what is the takeaway?

What's something I can take from here and share a little bit back with the world and. Or just take away. It does not always have to be something I share, but anytime something comes to me, I do feel inclined to share. And so as I was thinking about Hawaii, I knew actually when I was there, I could tell kind of what was coming to me and to my heart as I was hiking with my younger brother and my younger brother's dealing with some health issues. He was diagnosed with cancer, lung cancer, stage four, back in January.

And this was his first time that he could really get out and about. And so I told him, you know, we're going somewhere, we go to Hawaii. And it was as I was kind of watching him that I Realized that I would have this just. It hit me and a few different things happened. This lesson that I had, which was really like, we live in a world that it feels like there's a lot of one side or the other. There's either. Or whether that's politically, whether that's the way we feel, whether that's the way we think, we just.

We tend to do that. Right? Like, you hear the things like, it's impossible to be sad and happy or to laugh and to be mad at the same time. And now I get some of that, like, conceptually. But I just. For me, I feel like the trip and a few examples that I'm going to share just made it very clear that's not the case. I can experience both sides, and I actually look at most things as a spectrum versus one side or the other. And I think that helps a ton, because when we're one side or the other, we tend to get stuck.

Like. Like, well, if I can only be happy and I can't be sad, then I'm stay over here and be as happy as I can and ignore the sad or vice versa, probably worse. I just take on the sad and accept that I can't be happy. So a few things brought this up, and not just about feelings, but I'll give you the three examples. Speak. Wonder. Yeah. Rochester, New York, it's the other side. I'm in the. The east side, but I've driven through Rochester plenty of times. So I. You know, the first thing, we were walking down this beach one day.

It was very interesting because you had this. This sandy beach, these beautiful turquoise waters coming in. And, you know, it all sat at the bottom of kind of this jagged volcanic rock that, you know, the volcanoes are not active there, but this is really jagged, rough rock. It just was a. The terrain was not the greatest, and it was tough. So just interesting watching how all this kind of converged together, and you just had this beauty and kind of this, like, jagged, broken feeling that came from these.

These volcanoes. So it was. It was very interesting. And then a second thing came to me. We actually stayed at this resort for a few days. The first few days we were there anyway, and as we were driving up, you could tell that, you know, there's homelessness. There's actually a lot of homelessness in Hawaii. Some of it, I believe, is actually somewhat intentional community. They choose to live on the beach. But what was interesting was we stayed in this condo, and you would never know. It was like each side of this condo was two different worlds.

So we're staying on the fifth floor. We could walk out the front entrance and look over the railing and we could see in here chickens, like, going crazy. The chickens are fighting all the time, all day, all night. And you could look down and you could see some of the tougher areas and the homelessness. And again, it just. You could look out this side and go, my goodness, this is tough. Jump back into the. The condo and out the balcony side, and you've got this beautiful. This almost like private beach resort style.

Just the water and the waves, just all night and all day, crashing and crashing and crashing. It's just so peace and so serene. So it's just interesting that this one building could separate this picture of homelessness, of wild chickens, of stray cats everywhere. Not the nicest kind of. Just the look of it just was. Was what it was. And then on the other side, you've got this beauty in this resort. And so it was. It was very interesting. And then the third and the most important, the part that struck me and got me thinking about this and going down this path was watching my younger brother.

He's 34. We've been, you know, brothers since he was born. We've got an older and a younger sibling, but we always kind of hung out in the middle. And then those two on each end were much closer. So we've. We've been through it all. He's been the closest, most consistent person through all my ups and downs. He kind of followed me through all of it. And so, you know, when I found out he got sick, it was really a hard pill to swallow. And so anyway, I've spent a lot of time with him this year because we've had a lot of appointments and we're just.

We're close, so we talk a lot and things of that nature. But I haven't spent intimate time like this where it's just the two of us. We were away for five, six days. Haven't done that in a little while, not since last year. So it was really in those moments that I got to witness kind of what this disease has done to him. And even though he's gotten better since the beginning of the year, for sure, he's in a. He's in a better place. He's not the same person, and he's never going to be, and that was really hard.

So I remember walking behind him and just watching him and seeing him in the water where he struggled a little bit. I just found myself getting resentful and mad and the grief and all of that. That was there in the middle of this deep appreciation and gratitude that I had for being able to spend this time with him, because it really was a beautiful time. And that was the point to get away, to do our brother's trip, so to just do something different, something special. So it just struck me right then that, yeah, it's actually possible to be in this deep sense of gratitude for life, for this experience, for family, for my brother, and also to just be really p***** off if I'm being frank, because I just.

Sometimes it still just hurts that much to know that, you know, that's my little brother. That's the guy who's run with me and followed me, and it just. I never could have imagined that this would happen. But the beautiful part about all that is, again, I can experience both of that. And I actually wrote something about this and said, not only is it possible to embrace, you know, kind of opposite ends of the spectrum, if you will, I actually think that's where the piece is. And that relates incredibly well to.

To Sunday serenity, because I think there is peace and just understanding that this can be really good and fun and hard and all the things at one time. And as long as I can embrace and accept that that's where peace is. I'm not trying to run from, you know, the grieving and the hardness and the. And the sadness of it and trying to block that out, because that's not going to work. Eventually it's going to come back. And I'm also not just living and drowning in the sadness of this, because it was a beautiful time.

And that's what we. We got to experience, an incredible time. And so just like the physical environment with the rock and all that, and then the kind of the community environment, if you will, the way in which you had homelessness and kind of the wild animals and everything on one side and then this resort on the other, it all comes together, and sometimes it's just separated by a paved path or, you know, just a split second of the feelings and the thoughts that come to mind. And again, I think if we can find and embrace all of that at once, we're in a really good place.

And, you know, as I started with, we don't always live in a world where that seems to be the case. We've got such political divide that it's only one side or the other. We've just got these extreme beliefs, and it's not even politically, but just in general that it is one side or the other, and people find it hard to believe that if you're in the middle, like I've heard people say, it's not possible to be. To be neutral on certain things. Now, certain things I will agree. But I also think that, you know, there is a lot of middle ground, and if we can come to that, I think we're all better off for it.

So that's where I'm at. That's what I wanted to share a little bit from the heart here. Just a little lesson from Hawaii about embracing both sides. The good, the bad, the beautiful and the ugly, the brokenness and the. And the completeness. And, you know, I think that's possible. And I think more than being possible, it's actually very advantageous to us to. To take that in, to embrace it and to realize that, you know, we're going to go through life and we're going to. We're going to see all of that.

And the more that I can bring it together, blend it together, the better off I am and the better off I think the people around me will be. So hope you found some value here tonight in embracing the middle ground. I. I preach and I talk about that a lot because I just think we need more middle ground in today's world, and I think we can get there. So grateful to share about that. Grateful to be able to have these experiences and be able to share a little bit with you all. Hope to see you again next week.

And in the meantime, I hope you all have wonderful weeks. We'll talk to you soon.