Willingness and Reading the Fine Print
I’m excited to be starting a Big Book Study Group with my sponsor, my two sponsees and some other friends. It’s very intimate and we’ll not only be reading the Big Book, but actually working the steps together. I know not everyone shares my enthusiasm for things like this, and I should confess that I’m technically a lawyer and a big part of the draw for me was the reading and writing. We started with the Preface and did the four Forewords (1939, 1955, 1976 and 2001) in our first session and there was some grumbling because who actually reads the Preface and the Forewords?
Almost every time I open my Big Book I find something that I hadn’t seen before or hadn’t really understood, or just something that really amazes me. One thing I finally learned is that the Big Book really doesn’t deal in metaphors, it was intended as a manual for recovery:
We, of Alcoholics Anonymous, are more than one hundred men and women who have recovered from a seemingly hopeless state of mind and body. To show other alcoholics precisely how we have recovered is the main purpose of this book
Those are Bill’s italics, not mine, and what a stirring, bold statement. He was completely confident that he and his mostly alcoholic colleagues had discovered a treatment for an incurable disease. He tells us over and over again, follow these steps exactly, be thorough and fearless from the very start, throw everything else aside and believe this. Do these things and you’ll be free of the affliction that is fast consuming your life, and worse, the lives of the people love you. And he was right.
He lays out the Third Tradition a few paragraphs later, the part about only needing a honest desire to stop drinking to be considered a member of AA. I think back to my years of drinking and going to meetings. People had to know. People from the meetings I went to saw me walking in and out of bars, saw me avoiding their gaze, and they had to be able to smell it on me. It’s impossible that no one noticed me leaving a meeting at 9:00 am at Connecticut and R Street and going directly into a bar on Q Street. No one lectured me. No one wagged a finger in my face. And I came back the next day and the next and the next.
I’m not sure what I was doing. I was actively drinking and I went to a lot of meetings and sat politely and listened. I was moved plenty of times by the beautiful, brave, heartbreaking stories I heard. But I couldn’t stop drinking. I wanted to be sober so badly. I knew my life was draining away, that I was losing everything that mattered to me. I just thought that was going to my lot in life; to be an example for other alcoholics, but not the good kind. I did that for ten years and never managed more than six months of sobriety. At first, I dismissed what I heard at AA meetings because my landing hadn’t been quite as rough. It stood to reason that a lot of these folks needed to be reduced to a life without alcohol punctuated by endless AA meetings, but that wasn’t me. Despite the fact that I couldn’t stop drinking myself, I was going to fashion my own form of hybrid sobriety. A kind of sobriety that, of course, included sauvignon blanc. I really thought that way.
What changed? When my mom had her heart attack in 2018, I decided that I didn’t want to die and that I didn’t want to put my kids through the kind of death I knew alcoholism would eventually bring. That realization helped, but wasn’t enough to stop me, that took another disastrous year where I managed to cut most of the ties that were left. I ended up here in New York on Labor Day Weekend and moved into a sober house. I knew this was my last go at sobriety and I wasn’t terribly optimistic.
Bill starts his account of his famous meeting with Ebby Thacher, his long-time running and drinking buddy, on page eight. The meeting and Bill’s musings in the aftermath take up about five of the sixteen pages in “Bill’s Story,” so he must have thought it was important. Bill knew he was drinking himself to death, he’d been told Lois would soon be delivering him “to the undertaker or the asylum.” Bill gets a visit from his old drinking buddy and is stunned to find out he now has “religion” and managed to stop drinking. Bill is aghast, but starts to re-think his own views of religion and begins to wonder whether he might believe in a Higher Power, what its contours might be and whether it could help him stop drinking. Ebby dispatches Bill’s tortured epistemology with “Why don’t you choose your own conception of God:”
That statement hit me hard. It melted the icy intellectual mountain in whose shadow I had lived and shivered many years. I stood in the sunlight at last. 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. I saw that growth could start from that point. Upon a foundation of complete willingness. (emphasis in original)
This was Bill’s realization that his years in the wilderness were over; the key was a simple willingness to believe that a power greater than himself could restore him to sanity, to sobriety. For me, that moment came later that September as I was falling asleep one night in the sober house. I was only a few weeks removed from yet another stunning upheaval in my life. I was surrounded by the wreckage of my life. I was alone. I had no concrete plans, I was 58 years old and essentially living in a halfway house— certainly not the life I had envisioned for myself. But that night, with the sounds of First Avenue coming in through the windows, I realized I wasn’t scared or anxious anymore. I was safe and there was calm and peace in my heart for the first time in a long time. I should be kind of freaked out, I thought. But I wasn’t. I think for the first time I had complete willingness and knew I had reached a place where my growth could start.
Of course, it was all right in front of me all of the time. It was on display at every AA meeting I went to, people with years of sobriety openly sharing the secret of how they had done it. And it’s the very first paragraph in the 1939 edition:
We, of Alcoholics Anonymous, are more than one hundred men and women who have recovered from a seemingly hopeless state of mind and body. To show other alcoholics precisely how we have recovered is the main purpose of this book.
(Yes, I know this is in twice.)
I like to talk to sponsees about the miracles that finally brought us in, that saved our lives. Those are the stories that I think are the most powerful, the chance encounters, the unbelievable coincidences, the crazy things that happen that bring people to the Program and help restore them to sanity. Those are all miracles and Ebby Thacher showing up at Bill’s door is a magnificent one, but none of it matters without willingness. We come to that willingness in our own way and it’s usually accompanied by a lot of pain and loss, grief and desperation. I’m grateful I found it in time. It’s my own miracle and I hang onto it pretty tightly. Hopefully it will be enough to keep me sober today.
Thanks for letting me share.