I’m grateful for a fantastic visit with my daughter. I’m grateful for a sunshine-y day. I’m grateful for routines. I’m grateful for challenges. I’m grateful the glimpses inside aren’t terrifying anymore. I’m grateful that there’s always hope nearby. I’m grateful to be sober today.
We are very, very pleased to announce we are launching an AA meeting. Cleverly named “Anyone Anywhere,” it will be zooming to you live on Tuesday evenings at 7pm eastern.1 Not surprisingly, it will have a Beginner’s focus, will involve reading the Big Book together and have a topic-based discussion.
My sponsees and I venture out on Thursdays for what we call the “Tour de’AA.”2 We go to meetings around the City and even have plans for a Staten Island excursion. I think it’s interesting to see all of the different flavors of AA meetings. When I used to travel more, I’d attend meetings wherever I went and it leads to this take-away:
Considering the lack of organization and structure, AA is a pretty fucking amazing organization.
It’s entirely possible that AA’s amazing-ness springs from that lack of organization. And it is definitely proof that we alcoholics are capable of truly great things.3 The idea that you can go to a meeting in Stockholm or London or even Shanghai and have the same conversation with the same kinds of people who inhabit the chairs at the 79th Street Workshop or the Atlantic Group is pretty amazing.4 There's a surprising amount of brand stick-to-it-iveness. I'm astonished when I see what AA has accomplished--with no media presence, no fund-raising, no class-action tobacco-style litigation. And when you come down to it--the program of Alcoholics Anonymous outperforms all of the pricey treatment centers and pretty much everything medical science has to offer.
And it comes from studying a book published in 1939?
Yes. It took me about a decade to wrap my head around that. Because, you see, it’s a completely preposterous idea, this notion that you could read a book written by a flim-flam man and hopeless alcoholic with no medical training, no education in psychology, from the 1930’s, and be able to conquer the thing that’s plagued you for a really long time. Especially when you’ve been to rehabs and IOP’s and group therapy and individual therapy and tried Baclofen and the Sinclair Method and punching pillows and yelling and even Equine Therapy. Years of pouring my heart out to therapists. And nothing could keep me from drinking.
Yes. I found the idea that the Big Book of Alcoholics Anonymous could save me, could even apply to me, simply preposterous. I went to meetings and I listened wistfully while someone who was always more sober than me read “How it Works.” I thought these words were beautiful and haunting:
Rarely have we seen a person fail who has thoroughly followed our path. Those who do not recover are people who cannot or will not completely give themselves to this simple program, usually men and women who are constitutionally incapable of being honest with themselves. There are such unfortunates. They are not at fault: they seem to have been born that way.
Big Book, p. 58
I didn’t think I would ever get sober. After all of the failed attempts, when nothing could get more than 90 or 120 days? I’m still really at a loss to explain what happened to me. Like Bill, like lots of other alcoholics who improbably got sober, I finally had that moment of self-reckoning that opened the door just a crack and I was willing to try this, f***, maybe I’m even willing to entertain the possibility that it could work.
Spoiler Alert: The Big Book not only applied to me, it saved my life.
I’ll celebrate 3 and a half years of sobriety in April. I’m not good at math in base-12, but it’s significantly more sobriety than I was able to muster before. The ten years before I got sober, I didn’t put the principles laid out in the Big Book to work in my life. These last 42 months, I have. That’s my story and I’ll be sticking to it.
One of the cool things about AA is the multiplicity of meetings. Aside from geographic differences (here in NY “leading” a meeting is called “qualifying” and Canadians have a slightly different pronunciation of “alcoholism”), there are lots of “special interest meetings.” LGBTQ meetings, Women’s Meetings, Men’s Meetings, etc. Having a spread of meetings to address different perspectives, different people, is a really great thing and since the continuing charge of sobriety is to widen and deepen one’s spiritual life, seeing how lots of different people incorporate the principles of AA in all of their affairs is just really compelling. It conveys the message that this can work for just about anyone, anywhere.5
Not surprisingly, the focus of the Anyone Anywhere AA meeting will be reading the Big Book together and talking about it. Our first week, (that is next Tuesday!!), we’ll kick things off with the Doctor’s Opinion and I think I even have a pretty good guest speaker lined up.
This is the part where I get all schmaltzy and talk about the power and magic of AA. How that self-confrontation under terrible, desperate circumstances is sadly and usually what’s necessary to not only crack open a pretty-much self-published book by an alcoholic crackpot from the 1930’s, but to concede the possibility that there might be salvation in those eighty year-old pages. Because there is. All that’s necessary to make a beginning is the willingness to believe that there might possibly be a path out. Because there is.
I hope I see you on Tuesday. Literally.
For the uninitiated, AA meetings have names, often taken from the Big Book, e.g., “Jaywalkers” “As Bill Sees it,” “Mustard Seed. Or the location of the meeting: “79th Street Workshop,” “Midnite Club,” “Perry Street.”
Ok, I call it that and I feel like they will soon.
Also see, Noah and Ulysses S. Grant.
Meetings definitely have personalities.
sorry, that was a little cheap.
AA is a great (and lasting) example of a self-organising system. It organises itself around the core principles of the Big Book, and the rest is fluid and therefore resilient.
Recommend reading: A Simpler Way by Margaret Wheatley