OF POWER AND POWERLESSNESS

OF POWER AND POWERLESSNESS

Today I had done what I had never done before. I went to two consecutive meetings. Today being Sunday, I went to my usual men’s meeting where there were, atypically, about seventy men. The second meeting I had never attended, was a brisk al fresco one on Compo Beach where six hearty souls met around a warm fire on the beach to discuss the twelve steps on an overcast but clear morning. The Compo Beach meeting was a real treat because the men’s meeting with all the seventy men is somewhat overwhelming for me to share at and I was much more inclined to share at this small gathering and I did.

Both meetings were marked by pre holiday angst, agitation, gratitude and joy. Both meetings were either exclusively or predominantly men. So when I shared about my marriage at the second meeting, and the nods of the other five men around the fire bobbed up and down it was like looking in a mirror at guys who knew just what I was talking about, knew just what I was feeling, for they had been there and were going through or had gone through the same thing. I could speak, as it were, in code, without having to qualify and characterize every emotional tick, alleyway and byway. They knew what I was talking about. They had been down that road before. And when I left that smoky fire, I was firm in how I would proceed in speaking with the wife, the tone of my voice and the tack that I would have to take.

However the angst and agitation in the earlier men’s meeting were typical for this time of year but a bit more marked in the alcoholics where the so called holiday cheer, is something of a misnomer. Family get togethers have in the past turned into clash togethers, punch bowls into punch outs, family banquets into family brawls. I don’t know why this seems so prevalent amongst us alcoholics and to tell the truth it is somewhat foreign to me, both as a Jew (this is personally, an alienating time of the year) and as a family man where the family just isn’t that dysfunctional.

Yet the stories are almost universal that families in AA are totally dysfunctional and Xmas time is the time for functional caution to be thrown to the wind; and it is. So the men bring their considerable concerns to the meetings to thrash out their bogeymen, and let us know what their fears are, realizable or not, and to see what the collective wisdom is on how others have handled similar situations in their lives during this season of cheer. And the shares go on and people draw strength from the others in the room to be able to return home so that they can survive another holiday season with the family intact. And when all is said and done many of the men express their gratitude to the others whose participation helped those through their real and imagined annual troubles.

And James who came in feeling really sad said he was looking for more reasons to carry around his ill mood. And he made reference to another earlier share about alcoholism being all about willpower or will powerlessness. And James said that his feeling of unease came from not feeling that he had enough will power to be the source of that power to stay on that grid of life but, ‘coming into the meeting I realized all I needed to do was plug into its grid to get that power, that I did not have to be the generator of that power just to come to the meeting , sit down and let the power of the fellowship just flow through me and I then have all the power that I needed to feel good about myself and about everything else. That the AA grid had all the power I needed.’

Tanner then said he was going to be traveling and mused that when he first came into the rooms many years ago he asked ‘how long was the meeting going to last?’ His sponsor said in reply, ‘How long do you need it to last?’ ‘Today when I travel I remember that sage advice because if I don’t know where I’ll be, I need to remember that I may have to make that previous meeting last longer than the time that I am actually sitting at the meeting.’

And this is similar to the oft repeated quip of the question of the newcomer who asks how long does he have to come to meetings, to which he is invariably told ‘until you want to come’. I might even add that ‘until you have to come’ might be a corollary to that answer, because it becomes a spiritual requirement in one’s life. Nourishment for the soul, like daily prayer or meditation, ‘food for thought’.

And Barry the coffee maker, who had to leave early, sort of summed up the mood for us with his light hearted request ‘fellers, can the coffee maker get his round of applause early today, because he is leaving early and an early thanks would help him since this week he is working on issues of self esteem’. Which cracked everyone up, as his remarks usually do, and he spun around and walked out of the meeting.

© res 12/19/10