What a Small Town Taught Me About Letting Go

In December 2024, after 4.5 years of working towards my Bachelor of Science in Mechanical Engineering, I finally graduated from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. At that point, I knew I would be putting a bookmark in that chapter of my life and it was time to pursue something new, something more in line with my values. I was ready to start pursuing my career in psychology.

In my last semester of my engineering degree, I began applying to different treatment centres across Canada as a support worker. I never heard back from any of them. To be fair, I was not at all qualified for this position other than my personal experience. Most of them required an undergraduate degree in a related field. While this was discouraging, I did not give up. I reached out to a few contacts that I had in the recovery field. I was lucky enough to get an opportunity in Courtenay, British Columbia.

After growing up in the city of Montreal and going away to a school that had more than 40,000 students, moving to a town with only 20,000 people was terrifying to me.

When I finally got to Courtenay, I was ready to start building a life for myself. I didn't know a single person there and so I became hyper-fixated on meeting people. Rather than letting life flow the way that it would, I tried to control the situation that I was in and exert my will on it. I went to any and every AA meeting I could and participated in any gathering I could find. I did everything I could to speed up making friends. I wasn't doing these activities because I wanted to, I was doing them for the end result, to meet more and more people.

This brought me toward the wrong crowd. I was so desperate for friends that I found myself surrounded by people who did not align with my values. I would hop from friend to friend until I realized that the plan I had for myself was not working. It was exhausting. I was emotionally drained. I had feelings that I wasn't good enough to find people that I actually aligned with. It was highly discouraging. I even found myself in a relationship with a woman who I did not connect with at all. We were at different points in our life, we wanted different things and we were raised with completely different values. All of this and I was basically acting as a step father to her 4 year old child for 2 months.

Finally, I realized this was not what was best for me or my recovery and I put an end to all of this.

When I got out of that relationship, I found myself feeling very lonely for a couple of weeks. All the connections I had made up to this point had ended and I found myself back at square one. I took this as an opportunity to recognize that I was not surrendering to life. I wanted to get back to that. I spent a couple of weeks spending more time with myself while still engaging in activities that I enjoyed engaging in.

When I stopped looking for friends, that's when they found me. Up to this point, I had been in Courtenay for 5 months and after being surrounded by fellow Jews my whole life, I had yet to meet a Jewish person. At this time, I was playing in a recreational softball league. After one of the games, a guy on the other team came up to me and asked me if I was a part of the tribe. Confused how he knew I was Jewish, I said yes. That was the start of a close friendship. He had seen the Magen David necklace that I had on. It was a tiny necklace that was not very obvious and somehow, he caught a glimpse of it and decided to say something to me. At this point, I had already believed in a higher power, God, but this was just another sign that He was looking out for me.

When I stop trying to control my life and exert my will on what I think I want, God has a way of introducing the things that I need into my life. This friendship blossomed and we impacted each other in so many different ways. We introduced each other to different people, helped each other grow and helped each other see things in ourselves that we did not see before. He made me into a better man and this was all thanks to a "coincidental" encounter after we played each other in softball. The reason I put coincidental in quotation marks is because I do not believe that it was a coincidence at all. When I stop trying to control things, the right things tend to find me.

A few weeks after this, my sponsor introduced me to his son who was in town while he had a break from school. After talking to him, he told me he was big into Brazilian Jiu Jitsu. I had a few friends who had trained and I was a big UFC fan, I was always interested in getting into it. This was my chance. This was a sign that it was time for me to start training and so that's what I did. I went to my first class and I loved it. This was the start of what I've now been training for the last 10 months. This is another testament to how when I stopped trying to control things, the right things kept popping up in my life.

Training Jiu Jitsu has changed my life. I don't think I ever would have gotten into it had it not been for meeting that person at that time. There are so many aspects of training that cross over with my sobriety it is truly unbelievable. Humility, discipline, community, balance, respect. The list goes on.

The idea of surrender is now something that I carry with me throughout my life. It is not a perfect science but it is something that I try to revert back to. The way that the author Michael Singer explains it is that we need to take our preferences out of the things that we choose to do. He says that we need to try not to let past experiences, fear get in the way of living this life of freedom and being open to whatever life presents us. I’m still learning what that looks like, but I’ve found it’s easier to see in how I live than to try to explain it.