Attach

It is a sign of fragility. Thus drinking, an exercise in solitude.

We humans are creatures of habit. We organize life according to habitual patterns because this gives us security. Any change, even the smallest, in the space and time around us makes us anxious.

We would like to change habits so as not to be enslaved by them, but even changes become habits, leading to what we call dependency or addiction, which we can translate as attachment. It is the fear of loss that drives us to necessary habits.

What is called compulsion to repeat, a neurotic form the psychiatrist would say, is the difficulty in learning from mistakes. We humans, no, we struggle to learn from mistakes, and we trust our conscience more than the truth.

When we want to translate truth into reality, we enter a destructive conflict where the only remedy is drinking. But this drinking is pure orality, it is drowning in our solitude. Because even when drinking in company, we are actually alone.

The context and circumstances provide a backdrop, but we remain alone nonetheless. But in this relationship with ourselves and the intolerance of solitude, there is chemistry, that is, the substance we call alcohol.

Only for a few decades have we known that in the drink that gives us well-being there is something material, a substance called alcohol. Its properties are miraculous, a chemist would say: excellent disinfectant, preservative, incendiary, and explosive.

The pharmacist would also add digestive, analgesic, and anesthetic properties. Furthermore, it is useful in the hygiene of the environment and the body when combined with essences that sterilize and make pleasant to the smell every living being and the environment.

But alcohol is not drinking. We drink nature that gives us products like wine, or we take other substances to immerse ourselves in nature and rediscover those spiritual qualities that we hide or neglect, but that are within us.

The power and joy of creativity. The ecstasy that we fail to grasp in our ordinary struggles. The rest and tranquility in solitude, which we fear and seek. All of this helps us to live. We cannot deny it.

In past centuries, saints would wear sackcloth to mortify the senses and the flesh, but they did not deprive themselves of the joy of drinking and food.

The denial of pleasure is called sublimation in psychology. This is a form of psychic deviation that allows those who can achieve it a super-a-ment. I have broken the word down into three parts because sublimation is going beyond (super) without (a-privative) reason (mind).

This can happen with the help of natural or chemical substances, in psychedelic experiences. But it is also achieved through repetitive rituals, behavioral addictions, such as gambling, sex, and anything that exceeds the ordinary.

Distinguishing habit from addiction, that is, from the fragile and insecure attachment, but precisely for this reason necessary, is not correct. Slipping from habit into addiction is easy, not always dangerous, especially when there is control, that personal attitude that suggests we stop, so as not to lose what we are attached to.