Health & Wellness : What the Roots Were Actually Looking For
Sept. 30/26
This week the assignment was just to notice — not fix anything, not journal a treatise, just pay attention to how alcohol sounded when it came up. Was it a craving, some old rope pulling tight, or was it more like being asked if I wanted more coffee after I'd already said no twice — background noise, easy enough to wave off. Some days it was one. Some days the other. That alone told me something, because I used to assume the wanting ran at a constant hum, the same volume day to day. It doesn't. It comes and goes like weather.
There's a piece of neuroscience that reframed this for me more than any recovery book did — the distinction researchers draw between "wanting" and "liking." The brain's dopamine system, it turns out, isn't mostly in the business of pleasure. It's in the business of anticipation. It fires hardest not while you're drinking the thing but when a cue shows up that used to precede the reward — the sound of ice in a glass, six o'clock arriving, a hard week ending. The chemical isn't rewarding you for the drink itself. It's flagging the cue and pushing you toward it, whether or not the experience turns out to be worth much once you get there. Wanting and liking can come apart completely. You can go on wanting something you don't even like anymore.
I've watched roots do something close to this. A fig tree on the home place once found a hairline crack in an old clay irrigation line thirty feet off and sent a root straight for it — not toward water in general, toward that one leak, right past better soil closer by. Roots don't move toward what a plant needs in the abstract. They move toward a signal. And once a root finds a good signal, it commits hard — thickens, keeps returning to that exact path even after the leak gets patched and there's nothing left to find there. A well-worn reward pathway behaves the same way. It doesn't reassess. It keeps growing at the site of the old signal long after whatever was leaking there has dried up.
What sobriety has actually taught me isn't mostly about alcohol. It's that the pathway never cared what filled it in the first place — it just wanted a signal to run toward at the end of a day, something that said this part is over now. For years I assumed that marker had to be a drink. Take the drink away and what's left uncovered underneath is the real hunger, and for me, most of the time, that hunger turned out to be for a stopping point. A line between work and not-work. Permission to sit down. Not the alcohol itself — the boundary it used to stand in for.
So some weeks the craving shows up loud and some weeks it's just quiet static, and I've mostly quit trying to guess which one's coming, same as I quit trying to guess where a young tree will send its first serious root. You can understand the mechanism and still be surprised by where it grows. All I can tell you for certain is that the fig tree is still standing, the crack got patched years ago, and it's put out good fruit every summer since — off water it now gets exactly where it belongs.
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