Joe Considine: Person of the Week
Joe Considine is a father of three healthy adult children who are all living their best lives. He is a practicing attorney specializing in helping families get loved into treatment using Florida’s Marchman Act. Joe has been clean and sober for 36 years. He loves swimming, biking and painting and is a lifelong resident of West Palm Beach where he has been in long term loving life partnership with Dr. Alicia Haywood. Joe is a thirty-year member of The Board of Directors of Fern House, men’s recovery place.
Q. If you are in recovery, what was your drug(s) of choice and when is your sobriety date?
A. Alcohol and Cocaine.
Q. What do you like most about 12-step meetings?
Q. Do you think addiction is an illness, disease, a choice, or a wicked twist of fate?
A. Significant neuronal disorder.
Q. Who is your favorite celebrity in recovery?
A. Richard Starkey.
Q. If you ever retire, would you prefer to live by the ocean, lake, river, mountaintop, desert, or penthouse?
A. Ocean or lake, as long as I can swim distances.
A. Practice of mindfulness and meditation.
Q. How do you measure success?
A. To what extent have I contributed to the well-being of others.
Q. What is your biggest pet peeve?
A. The inner voice at night telling me to go ahead and eat the ice cream.
A. Fern House Men’s Recovery House in West Palm Beach for indigent men.
Q. Who has been the biggest influence throughout your life?
Q. From what school of thought or teacher did you learn the most from?
A. The teachers I have had in the practice of mindfulness including Ram Dass when I was a teen all the way to the present with Jon Kabat-Zinn.
Q. Where are you from and where do you reside now?
A. West Palm Beach, Florida.
Q. If you were giving a dinner party for your 3 favorite authors, living or dead, who would they be?
A. Christopher Hitchens, Ana Patchett, Doris Goodwin Kearns and Oscar Wilde.
Q. What’s your concept of a Higher Power?
A. The accumulate wisdom of mankind as gleaned through observation and use of reason.
Q. What book(s) have you read more than once?
A. “Better Angels of Our Nature” by Steven Pinker and “Team of Rivals” by Goodwin.
Q. Which film have you watched the most?
A. Lincoln by Steven Spielberg.
Q. Who is your favorite film director?
A. Toss-up between Steven Spielberg and Coen Brothers.
Q. What surprised you most about living sober?
A. How difficult it was at first and then how easier it got with practice. The answer to the question of how one gets to Carnegie Hall is the same answer for how does one gets and stays sober: “Practice…practice…practice…”
Q. If you could give advice to your younger self what would it be?
A. Try not to take yourself so seriously.
Q. What books are you reading now?
A. “Wanderlust” by Reid Mitenbuler.
Q. What is your favorite App?
A. SpanishDict.
Q. Are you binge watching any TV series?
A. Diplomat. Shrinking (again) and The Queen’s Gambit (again.)
Q. What is your favorite play or musical?
A. Wicked.
A. Denzel Washington or Daniel Day Lewis.
Q. What is your favorite musician and or band?
A. Steely Dan.
Q. What is one word you would use to describe yourself?
A. Hopeful.
Q. What is your favorite city?
A. My hometown.
Q. What sport(s) do you like to play or watch?
A. I like to swim distances and to ride my mountain bike.
Q. What is your favorite restaurant?
A. Thai Haru…a neighborhood Thai place.
Q. What is your favorite cuisine?
A. Thai.
Q. What is the best piece of advice someone has given you?
A. We did not say it would be easy. We said it would be worth it.
Q. What is the best piece of advice you’ve given someone else?
A. You deserve to be sober. You deserve to know peace.
Q. Have you ever been arrested and, if so, what for?
A. Protesting on campus in the 1970s.
Q. What is one thing that always makes you smile?
A. To see people recover, to see the light come in their eyes, to see families reunited.
Q. What was the proudest moment in your life?
A. Probably when a mother wrote to me to thank me for helping get her daughter off the street and into treatment and that her daughter was now one year clean and starting college.
Q. What is a style trend you wish would come back?
A. Pursuit of intellectual matters and making science important once again.
Q. What do you love most about yourself?
A. That I care deeply about my family and friends and those in need of recovery.
Q. What are five things you always carry with you?
A. Clean underwear, sense of humor, my recovery.
Q. What is your biggest fear?
A. Missing out on all the great stuff that’ll happen when I am gone.
Q. Where do you go when you want to be alone?
A. In the words of Brian Wilson: “In my room.”
Q. What is your biggest regret?
A. That I did not start swimming distances as a younger person so I could now be able to swim across Lake Como at night.
Q. What is the greatest risk you’ve ever taken?
A. Picking mushrooms in a cow pasture outside Tallahassee and getting sick for days.
Q. What is something you are currently curious about?
A. The neurobiological loss of autonomy among those with substance use disorders.