"Life on Life's Terms"

“Life on Life’s Terms” is one of AA’s many bumper-sticker slogans, a phrase repeated and passed around so much from person to person that it has both taken on and lost a life of its own.

The phrase as typically used is meant to express a commitment to humility and submission in one’s life, evoking the innumerable facets of existence that are just way beyond the control of the individual - everything from physical laws to the decisions of other people to random moments of chance. You will get older and die, other people will disappoint you and hurt you, and a freak mechanical accident could make a plane fall from the sky and flatten you into a fine paste as you read this. According to traditional AA, a lot of us wind up turning to drinking because we feel wildly frustrated about all of this and drinking is the only consistent way to smash our brains into feeling better about it. The fact that bad things happen means that there’s something wrong with the world or there’s something wrong with us, and either way it’s completely unworkable and completely unfair.

This image of alcoholic entitlement and misalignment springs directly from AA’s institutional roots. AA as an organization emerged from what I’ll call “Experimental American Protestantism”, a broader religious movement that saw many new expressions and forms of Christian religious communities develop in a nation without an explicit state-religious history. AA’s founders did noble work in trying to make the organization as ecumenical and open as they could, but its explicitly Christian origin remains hard to miss. References to a neutral “higher power” often blur with references to the capital-G male-gendered God of Western monotheism. The central project of traditional AA is continuous with the themes of confession, submission, and purification that have animated Christian thought and practice for millennia.

“Life on Life’s Terms” is a half-agnosticized expression of this central project. “Life on God’s terms” would be a more explicit expression of this sentiment, and that expression finds resonance in various forms in traditional AA. “Thy will be done”, from the Lord’s Prayer (often recited at the end of meetings), is a great example of this. The “Third Step Prayer”, one of AA’s official prayers, goes as far as saying “relieve me of the bondage of self, that I may better do Thy will”.

So, within the traditional image, the idea that life sucks and is unfair is a self-centered delusion that is at the core of our drive to drink ourselves stupid. In reality, God is all-good, all-powerful, and ever-present in the world, patiently waiting for us to realize that there is indeed a plan for the world and for each and every one of us in it. All of the friction and pain in our lives is a result of our self-centered resistance to this divine plan, for us arrogating God’s powers for ourselves, declaring ourselves to be more powerful that we could ever possibly be. The suffering and injustice in God’s world was brought about by our own Original Sin, and/or is a necessary condition for Free Will and higher virtues like bravery and tenacity and serious self-sacrifice. Ultimately, on the plane of existence that really matters, justice and beauty and joy are inevitable and unshakable, and we should keep our minds turned there to the greatest extent that our feeble and fallible willpower allows.

This image does a lot of work for a lot of people, and animates many to get and stay sober and become more thoughtful and compassionate citizens. I don’t wish to denigrate it or disprove it here. What I will do now is set it aside, as one tool among many, and see what is available for those of us whose encounter with life is not religious in the sense that I just described.

I’ll begin by noting that the phrase “Life on Life’s Terms” begs some interesting questions from a secular perspective. What are “Life’s Terms”, exactly? From the broadly Christian perspective outline above, “Life’s Terms” are synonymous with the intentional will of God, who Himself imbued the world with structure and significance. But what sense can we make of the phrase “Life’s Terms” outside of this framework?

What I want to suggest here is that “Life” has no “Terms”, at least not in the sense that intentional, verbal beings like humans do. There certainly are limits imposed upon our individual lives, we certainly are not at cause of every single thing that occurs in our world. But those limits and those causes are not linguistic - the world is out there, but sentences to describe the world are not. “Meaning”, both in the sense of existential significance and linguistic signification, is something that we add to our experience.

I find this most apparent when I look at how the “meaning” of my experiences has changed over the years, especially the experiences involving heavy drinking. I drank a lot for a really long time, which had a significant impact on my relationships and the overall trajectory of my life. At the beginning, I made that mean that I was a broken failure of a human being, that I can’t be trusted make any decisions whatsoever, that the point of my life was now to serve the needs of literally anybody else but me. Now, four years and change later, I make it mean that I’m a person who can and does make deep and extraordinary changes in my life, a person who sets things right as best as I can when I cause harm, a person who can be with anybody’s pain, especially my own. The experiences that I thought to be the most isolating and shameful have become the experiences that bring me the closest to people.

Which meaning is right? Am I “really” a fuckup or “really” a bigger-hearted person than I was? Neither! All that happened were the things that happened, and I’ve woven an ever-shifting story about it as time has gone on, a story that has mutated and grown as I’ve encountered other stories and experienced different needs to meet in my life.

So the phrase “Life on Life’s Terms” serves for me as a sort of Zen koan, sort of like “what is the sound of one hand clapping?”, a chunk of language that points beyond itself and serves to shake up my familiar cognitive presumptions and habits. It reminds me that life is not linguistic in and of itself, that labels and stories are tools to be used to deal with the ever-shifting explosion of sensations that human existence is, that what life means - and what I make life mean about about me, is ultimately my responsibility.