I’m grateful for another rainy day. I’m grateful for the way things happen when I let them. I’m grateful for new discoveries. I’m grateful for getting back to work. I’m grateful for a chance to speak at a meeting. I’m grateful to be sober today.
I read something really beautiful yesterday. It was about someone realizing that they’d lost sight of what really mattered to them and what it’s like to slowly discover that maybe, what had been lost, wasn’t lost forever. The sentence that really grabbed me was this one:
I have to trust every day that what is meant for me is out there.
That’s what Jane wrote yesterday and I thought it was fantastic. Not just a little fantastic, really fantastic. I think she really summed up exactly what we are kind of realizing/doing over here—coming to understand how restoring the internal navigation system to the factory settings—produces this torrent of creativity and inspiration. How expressing that becomes a multiplicative function of inspiration and helps drive our recovery from a seemingly hopeless state of mind and body.
I had a chance to speak at a meeting yesterday. I carry around a rough outline of the points I think are important to make in my head, but you may have noticed, I tend to digress sometimes; As though I’m waking up from a semi-illicit nap, there are moments when I’m listening to myself talking and wondering how am I going to connect this up? Anyway, I was telling the crazy story of Bill W. coming in, the part where he went from the drunk guy wanting to speak at meetings to being given the chance to work with other, likely terminal, alcoholics. In the space of like a month!
I actually get choked up when I talk about that, and did at the meeting yesterday, too. I’m not sure what exactly it is I find so moving about it. Maybe it’s the sheer improbability: That an alcoholic, flim-flammer from the 1920’s and 30’s, whose only medical training came as a consequence of being treated, managed to arrive at an understanding of the disease of addiction that still prevails today, eighty years later. More importantly, was able to encapsulate a blueprint for living that has radically altered and saved millions and millions of lives.
Bill W’s story discloses two central realizations in his life: The day at Winchester Cathedral when he realized he was probably an alcoholic and the day he had dinner with Ebby and realized he lacked the power to will him self sober. It was this second realization that marked Bill’s beginning and it didn’t take a huge leap of faith. It’s one of those great leaps that actually come from small steps:
It was only a matter of being willing to believe in a power greater than myself. Nothing more was required of me to make my beginning.
Big Book, p 12
And what is you need to come to believe? That’s not even so hard, reading Bill’s prescription with the Second Step suggests one simply needs to be willing to believe there might be, could possibly be, a power great enough to restore sanity. As a lawyer, I’m going to tell you that is far from iron-clad; there is plenty of wiggle-room, if you need it. But the point is, you don’t really end up needing the wiggle room, because when it takes hold, life begins to change in a really wondrous way. Again, when I say that, I emphasize it is not wondrous in an Instagram kind of way, but in the sense that appreciating and finding one’s actual place in this wondrous Universe is plenty intoxicating—even for this alcoholic.
Jane celebrated a year of sobriety on January 1, but there’s another anniversary coming up for her and it marks the night she walked down the stairs to the 79th Street Workshop for the first time. I would say it was courage that took her down the steps into that basement, in the sense of being guided by her heart. It is that same kind of courage that gets you a year of sobriety, through thick and thin. It’s the courage to begin believing that maybe “what is meant for me is still out there.” And it’s that courage that finally lets you glimpse what you thought had been lost: The person you were meant to be and the life you were meant to lead.
Thanks for Letting Me Share