Life & unmanageability

 'Life' has many meanings. The OED lists dozens of them.

Chief among them:

1. The condition or attribute of living or being alive; animate existence. Opposed to death or inanimate existence.
2. The animate existence of an individual living person, animal, etc., viewed with regard to its duration; the period from birth to death, from birth to a particular time, or from a particular time to death.
3. The series of actions and occurrences constituting the history of an individual (esp. a human being) from birth to death.

Other meanings are secondary to these.

'Unmanageable' has several meanings, too. The OED lists them thus:

• Difficult or impossible to handle or manipulate properly or conveniently owing to physical qualities such as size, shape, weight, condition, etc.; awkward, cumbersome, unwieldy.
• Of an immaterial thing: difficult or impossible to cope with; inconvenient, awkward, demanding.
• Difficult or impossible to control, govern, or regulate.
• Of an event, action, or situation.
• Of a person or a person's character or disposition.

When we talk of our lives being unmanageable, what we mean depends on which of the meanings of 'life' and 'unmanageable' we are invoking.

Sometimes people construe our lives being unmanageable as a general gnomic truth (gnomic referring to gnome, in this sense meaning 'a short pithy statement of a general truth'). The sense is that life, as a phenomenon in the universe or its individual manifestation in each of us (meanings (1) and (2) above), is not amenable to management or regulation. This is true, but it is true in the same way that life cannot be climbed, grated, or spat out. It is simply not a suitable object of the activity of 'management'. Apart from being an empty observation, it is also an unnecessary one: it does not contradict a false assumption that people actually operate with. In brief, this observation does not correct any misperception or clarify our particular position.

Sometimes people construe our lives being unmanageable as a more specific gnomic truth: in definition no. 3, with life as a series of actions and occurrences constituting our personal histories, it is asserted that life in this sense cannot be managed. We are now in more productive territory, as we are discussing phenomena—actions and occurrences—which are indeed open to management. If 'manage' means 'control, govern, or regulate', can actions and occurrences be 'controlled, governed, or regulated'. Yes. I am typing this. I am controlling the typing. It's incorrect to say that actions and occurrences cannot be controlled, governed, or regulated. What is true, however, is that the ability to control, govern, or regulate the series of actions and occurrences in a person's life is limited, both by internal factors (lack of capability, lack of willingness, conflicted motivations) and external factors (laws of nature, the actions of others). The assertion that our lives are unmanageable in this sense is neither absolutely true nor absolutely false. The truth lies in between these two poles and also varies between individuals.

The attempt to control that which cannot and should not be controlled is indeed a salient feature of alcoholics, but if you've watched the news lately, you'll see that this phenomenon is not limited to alcoholics. The passage in the Big Book on this is not describing alcoholics but human beings.

The first requirement is that we be convinced that any life run on self-will can hardly be a success. On that basis we are almost always in collision with something or somebody, even though our motives are good. ... Our actor is self-centered—ego-centric, as people like to call it nowadays. He is like the retired business man who lolls in the Florida sunshine in the winter complaining of the sad state of the nation; the minister who sighs over the sins of the twentieth century; politicians and reformers who are sure all would be Utopia if the rest of the world would only behave; the outlaw safe cracker who thinks society has wronged him; and the alcoholic who has lost all and is locked up. (Page 60–62)

Alcoholics are thus just one example of this.

In addition to attempting to control that which we cannot and should not, there is the phenomenon of being unable to control that which we can and should control:

Above everything, we alcoholics must be rid of this selfishness. We must, or it kills us! God makes that possible. And there often seems no way of entirely getting rid of self without His aid. Many of us had moral and philosophical convictions galore, but we could not live up to them even though we would have liked to. (Page 62)

Still, we're not yet talking exclusively about alcoholics. In We Agnostics, there is a description of people of faith in general (not just alcoholics) who have the antidote to the above problem.

People of faith have a logical idea of what life is all about. Actually, we used to have no reasonable conception whatever. We used to amuse ourselves by cynically dissecting spiritual beliefs and practices when we might have observed that many spiritually-minded persons of all races, colors, and creeds were demonstrating a degree of stability, happiness and usefulness which we should have sought ourselves. (Page 49)

Faith as the antidote to an inability to live stably, happily, and usefully is a generalised solution that alcoholics, amongst others, can avail themselves of.

So, if we disregard the fact that life, as a phenomenon, is not subject to management (which is a trivial truism) and the fact that the actions and occurrences of life are partly within our control and partly not (which is a more substantive and interesting truism), we are left with this:

An unmanageable life is one in which I waste my time and energy trying to manage what inherently cannot be managed and failing to manage what I should be managing (my beliefs, thoughts, and behaviour).

Apart from the fact that this is essentially the definition of dysfunction, we're left with a difficulty because of the tense of the first step:

We admitted we were powerless over alcohol—that our lives had become unmanageable. (Page 59)

Had become implies that our lives once were manageable. The difficulty with all of the above interpretations of unmanageability are that they are inherently or eternally true. There is no movement from manageable to unmanageable.

Being powerless over alcohol means I cannot control, govern, or regulate the course of and the occurrences within my life. Whatever plans and efforts I make can be derailed as and when the impulse to drink overcomes me, and then the physical phenomenon kicks in such that I'm done drinking when the drinking is done drinking. This form unmanageability is acquired only when I become powerless over alcohol. Now the tense makes sense.

Funnily enough, the OED actually cites the first step in illustrating the meaning of unmanageable:

... and the sense cited is the difficulty or impossibility of controlling, governing, or regulating an event, an action, or situation.

This sense of unmanageability arose hand in hand with my drinking, and does not go until the risk of drinking is eliminated a day at a time through the daily reprieve.

The corollary of this is that I do regain the ability to control, govern, or regulate those parts of my life it is my business to control, govern, or regulate, namely my beliefs, thinking, and behaviour, all subject to the obtainment of God's help and to the caveat of progress not perfection.