12 Hours Drunk or One Spiritual Experience

The rose-tinted beer goggles want to slip over your eyes and tell you a story that... it's just no longer true for you and I watched the Odyssey recently and it reminded me of the Odyssey the great Homer's work of or the great first work of western literature in many ways which is a wonderful epic book which is a monster to actually read so the big movie's done a great job I think of turning that into something that's very watchable but There's a part within the story where Odysseus, as he's trying to make it home, has to pass these sirens.

And these sirens are these seductive sirens that almost mermaids that live on this rocky outcrop.

Funnily enough, just a quick aside, where we have our retreat every year in Ibiza, there is a rock called Esvedra.

It's 160 million years old, that rock.

It's said to be this sort of energetic force.

It's amazing, makes our retreats really special.

But it's also said that that apparently is where those seductive sirens were from on the Odyssey.

But anyway, back to the point.

And Odysseus, to protect himself, has to tie himself to the mast so that he doesn't get drawn towards the sirens because it would crash the ship and they all would sink to their deaths, as it were.

And it reminded me a little bit of that rose-tinted moment in our lives when we think, wouldn't it be nice to...

Two, have a couple of drinks, be with my friends, do all those things that we once did.

And very often it's the thing that trips us up because we feel like we're missing out.

You know, that fear of missing out.

Am I missing out? Is my life not as rich and as meaningful and connected as it was when I was drinking? And for so many of us, because we forget quite quickly what it was like when we were drinking, The brain is really clever, right? It wants to paint a relatively positive picture about our life.

So it's selective.

We don't carry these full replay memories.

We just take little snippets out.

So what tends to happen is then when we reflect upon a drink or two and the rose-tinted beer goggles have slipped over our eyes, we just cherry-pick the best bits.

The moments with loved ones and friends and laughter.

Maybe it was around Christmas.

Or for me, I always go back... to my times in Dublin when I was about 24, 25 years old.

Tara and I just connected.

All our best friends were there.

And we were the types that spent a lot of time in and out of pubs.

Best pubs in the world, by the way, in Ireland.