A FAITH THAT WORKS

A FAITH THAT WORKS

And then James said 'What is so characteristically true about AA and so different from everything else is that we are promised a path to a faith that works.' I don’t know of anything else that I have ever experienced that has brought me closer to other humans,to other men than AA.

Picture a room of 50 odd (and I do mean odd) men who get together every Sunday at 7:30 AM to spend time in a church social hall in order to share our hopes, fears, dreams, problems and hopefully solutions with each other. But mostly it is the shared experience that lets us know that we are not alone in feeling the way that we feel. As men we are brought up to be islands of stoic resolve, never breaking down that wall of unbreachable feeling so that the outside world will know just what we experience in our hearts.

They don’t know how we love. They don’t know how we fear; for ourselves, our families, our souls our wives and children. We never permit them to see into that well of emotion for fear that what they will witness will make them think less of us.

Yet we need them to see it. Without that experience the most important people in our lives don’t know us. So we must seek it elsewhere and we do that in AA.

Palter,our re-frocked priest, notes that if any men attend the Sunday services after our meeting, one would be hard pressed to see half the number of men in attendance than we have at our meeting. Why? Because the spiritual sustenance that men get from a church service is valueless to a man. It is at best an intellectual exercise.

Our rooms provide an emotional battle ground to face our enemies, choose our weapons and fight our demons with the help and support of men who have been to the same Waterloo and fought against the same demons and have learned to hold them at bay.

And now, we are here to help us learn to keep our demons at bay. But we must join the club, learn some of the principles and start to 'practice those principles in all our affairs' as the twelfth step says. And then we are promised a path to a faith that works. But we have to trudge that path, we must work the steps, the faith being only promised if we practice the principles in all our affairs.

I come to listen to a group of men speak in metaphors like I’ve never heard before. Like Albert; - 'I have to take out my tool kit all the time in order to fix the problems that I face daily. But as I join in facing these situations and apply my tools to them, they get dull. And I come here on a weekly, even daily basis in order to sharpen those tools. You men are my sustenance and my whet stone. And I remember to bring my sharpening stones to polish and buff my tools to keep them sharp so that they will be ready to handle those situations that repeatedly present themselves to me.'

And Jon E remarked that at Christmas dinner he could have engaged his mother in law in some repartee that would have ended in fireworks which nobody would have enjoyed. But instead 'I took your counsel and put on my cooking smock and helped with the cooking'. And Darryl who knew that the Christmas day was going to be difficult but he could not put his finger on just why, was looking kind of odd. His son asked 'what’s the matter Dad?' , and in the past just such a small interrogative would have caused him to launch into harangues of the grossest proportions, leaving no one unscathed. But yesterday he had the good sense just to say (as would any ordinary person) 'I don’t know, I’m just feeling a bit squirrelly'. And his son knew exactly what he meant and said, 'don’t sweat it Dad, just leave all the heavy lifting to us'. 'And if I hadn’t been in the program who knows what kind of radioactive chain reaction I would have launched.'

And Connor noted that he had stopped for breakfast before the meeting and had seen the front page of The Post on which was a picture of two servicemen taking fire in Kandahar. They had red stocking hats on. Which caught him up for a moment for his son was an officer in that province in some redoubt that was in the mountains by the Pakistan border in the Pashtun Kush with Delta company.

And with some pride he said that he felt sure that his son would be alright because two days ago his son had emailed his fiancée with a note saying that he was really happy and confident he would be fine,'this is what I’ve been trained to do'. Connor choked a bit and said that he truly believed what his son said. He got that faith from being with men in the rooms by drawing on their faith that things are as they should be and his son is where he should and wanted to be.

I left the meeting knowing I was going to see my wife to have that ultimate discussion of whether we were going to stay together as a couple or not. One thing I was sure of. A year had gone by leading to this point and I knew that the answer was going to be different from what I wanted and imagined it to be a year ago. But I was alright with that answer. Because after a year of thinking about it and learning about me, and understanding finally about the me and the her and the us, I finally realized that the us was no longer working and in the back of my mind I was hoping and expecting that she would come to that realization too.

Frankly neither of us had the energy required to put into repairing the relationship; that too much energy was needed to go into the repair of our individual lives. The time for that repair was a decade, perhaps two ago. The window of that opportunity, if ever there was one, was long gone. Now, there was only a window of recognition,acceptance and acknowledgment. Well, we finally did that and I think we two have finally come to terms and are good with that without all the recriminations that could have gone along with that but won't.

I owe that to that 'promised path of faith.' My wife may owe it to some series of deductive reasons. Which may be fine for her. But I just know that for me, mine is the softer and gentler way and if I am ever able to find the promises of the program, it will be through that spiritual awakening in the ‘faith that works.’

© res 12/25/10

REPAIRATIONS [SIC]

REPAIRATIONS [SIC]

I find it astonishing and perhaps a little bit unnerving that with only eleven months of solid sobriety in me that I am considered an authority on anything in the rooms. Yet the other day I shared my desperation about my relationship with my wife and that with her resistance to resolving our marital discord she finally precipitated my insisting that we either come to an agreement to talk or I will file for official separation. Now in truth, I cannot afford to do that but I hoped that the threat would get her to move her ass from this ‘deer frozen in the headlights’ position and move on with her life so that I could move on with mine. But all that is beside the point.

The point as I said, is this notion that I have any expertise in this business of life, marital relations and 'what one does do after 38 years of marriage when it all has started to crumble around you.' And I am just as at fault for the implosion of my marriage as surely as Joshua was for the implosion of Jericho. No doubt at times I felt as self righteous about bringing it all down around me as he, but I have since learned to moderate my anger and self righteousness because I have learned that however justified I may feel about pointing the finger of blame at my spouse for her collusion in this marital maelstrom, I have to suck it up because unleashing that pent up anger, energy and bile will not do either of us any good and surely will redound to our mutually assured destruction.

So when I sat down with Peter for breakfast today, ostensibly because he felt that my experience was one that he shared, I felt a bit ill at ease since I was unsure what he expected of me and doubly wary since we had just finished a chapter in the Big Book entitled 'Working with Others'. Well was I going to be working with others? This was clearly what we call Twelve Step work, which is taking the program to others or in this case helping another alcoholic out. And really I, we, can only help 'others' out by sharing our 'experience, strength and hope' with them so they can try to see themselves in our dilemmas and pain in order to see their way clear of their dilemmas and pain.

What I told Pete was that after I shared at that meeting I had fully intended to confront my wife with an ultimatum and tell her that she had had a full year to determine whether she wanted to get back together. That I was not happy being strung along waiting for her to get her emotional act together. And she had better make a decision or else I would make one for her. But somewhere in the back of my mind I knew that she had not done the emotional leg work that I had done and been doing for the past year. She had basically tread water, and her strength was giving out and she was going under. She was in fact, going to drown.

And I began to be frightened and worried for her. She told me that she couldn't think through all the emotional problems in her life while she was working on her PhD and needed a few weeks to get through this semester; and then we could talk. I guess I'm a sucker for my wife's tribulations and certainly don't want another meltdown, nor be present for her Gotterdammerung or be the cause of it.

And what Pete gleaned from this was that with ninety days under his belt neither he nor his wife yet had the emotional perspective to come to an informed, mature and sober decision about their lives together. They were still wet behind the ears, as it were, and hadn't yet begun to explore their character defects to the point where they could recognize them before they could act on them. Well at least Pete understood that much in his first ninety days, that he needed to keep on coming and that the adage in AA of trying not to make any major decisions in the first year was sage advice acquired from the experiences of thousands of alcoholics over the past many years.

I shared another bit of what I had been thinking which while not a secret was never said outright in the rooms before and that was that just not drinking and coming to meetings would not keep you sober. It will keep you from drinking but not sober. And Pete knows all about that, because for eighteen years he was a dry drunk and as soon as the familial restraints came off, the dry modifier came off and he became just an ordinary drunk. And he realizes that without solidifying his program through spiritual acceptance, humility, and attempting to live life on a completely different energy level among friends, he will never achieve a lasting sobriety and with that any hope for a stable marriage or in the absence of that, an equitable and serene separation.

We have agreed to check in with one another pretty much on a daily basis since we have a lot in common. We are the same age, children about the same age and education and similar marriage situations and certainly married for the same period of time. Slightly different periods of non sobriety but that does not matter as much as finding a common solution.

So I am beginning my journey into twelve step work and it is not as daunting as I thought it would be. But knowing how fragile my sobriety was and how fragile it could be gives me pause whenever someone asks for help. And that's good. For I should never feel so confident in either my sobriety or my abilities to help others in theirs that I should feel cocky enough to place either in jeopardy. A good lesson for me in the coming New Year.

© res 12/22/10

A ROOM ON THE FOURTEENTH FLOOR

A ROOM ON THE FOURTEENTH FLOOR

He was stuck in Boston the day before Christmas and he was getting pretty edgy. Wildman hadn't been to a meeting for some time now and he had been literally chewing on his nails on the 23rd floor of the John Hancock building while he was at the business meeting that his office sent him to but all he could think about was lunchtime. Ah, lunchtime, when he could get away to the fourteenth floor where there was a 'Friends of Bill' meeting and he could finally get back to a routine that he had been missing for the past two months.

When your daily routine is to go to an AA meeting every morning before work and you suddenly stop, it is like stopping coffee, or for some like stopping a drug. First you get irritable and discontent. Then you get moody and then if you don't watch out you may go back to drinking. And that may not happen over a few weeks, but over months or even a year. You may feel like you have developed an aura of invincibility and before you know it, bang!, you’re hitting the bottle worse than ever.

Well Wildman had been down that road before and that's why he was so eager to get to the fourteenth floor noon meeting. He wasn't going to get caught in that position again! And he was thinking about the past few weeks and the silly things that had led him to his desperate sense that he was approaching a drink. There was his young son James who stubbed his small toe and broke it. Not ordinarily a big deal except that Wildman had left his coat on the floor late one night after coming home from work and as the boy came tearing down the stairs to greet him in the morning 'slip - boom - crash' and one child with a broken toe.

Ten hours of kicking himself in the ass followed, as well as, of course, ten days of recriminations from his wife. Which ordinarily he could take in stride but it was getting on toward Christmas and it was only his second one sober and the anticipation was getting tense and if anyone else in the household had intended to acknowledge this you could have fooled him!

'Why don't the others in the house give me the credit I deserve for all the effort I have put into my sobriety?', he thought, and then immediately had the answer, 'well why should they? You never put much thought into how they felt about your getting drunk all the time! Did you give them credit for the effort they put in understanding your alcoholism when you were in the active thro's of it?'

And he swallowed hard and stuffed that line of self pitying questioning into his pity pot and flushed it down the toilet. He had a lot more to be thankful for at this time of the year than he had any right to expect. And expecting heroic applause from his family for his staying sober was way above his pay grade.

So he really needed this meeting and he hastily debarked from the elevator and headed for the assigned room which he had previously scouted since he did not want to miss anything to a search and rescue mission. At which point he practically ran into this woman who was wandering, half dazed in the hallway, not quite sure where she was going. First she moved purposefully down the hall toward the room, then moved back in the direction of the elevator.

'Can I help you', Wildman asked. 'Is this where the meeting is', she said, sotto voce. Wildman whispered back, 'you mean the AA meeting? 'Oh, I shouldn't go I'm going to drink anyway! He dumped me, he hates me. I don't know what a meeting will do, I'm too fat, I'm just going to drink, I know it'.

And Wildman said 'well you're here already, and you may as well attend the meeting. Look, if after the meeting you still feel like drinking, well then you gave it a try!' And she stared at him sort of dumbstruck and said 'ok,' in a small unconvinced voice.

Well the usual meeting chairman was not there so the group agreed (there were only five in attendance), to let the half dazed woman lead the meeting since she clearly had the greatest need. And she told the group that she had two years sobriety, solid sobriety, and had been in what she thought was a solid relationship and here it was the day before Christmas and her boyfriend dumped her. Was it her looks, her weight, the fact that she was in AA? And as she poured out all of her fears, regrets and hopes and desires, she broke down in tears and sobbed for a good five minutes. The group murmured soothing words to her and when she collected herself she said thanks.

The meeting went on and finished and Wildman felt he had gotten a really good shot of AA out of it. But perhaps not as much as what he got when that woman came up to him after the meeting and said, 'Thanks for guiding me into that meeting. I know now that I'm not going to drink. I just needed a place and people who understand me to hear what I needed to say'.

So this morning, Wildman approaches Christmas as serenely as he has ever done. His son will walk with a bit of a limp and if he tunes his wife's squawking out just right, there will only be echoes as he goes through the day as calmly as he knows how. And he really doesn't need high praise, brass bands and memorial speeches. He doesn't need acknowledgement to any greater degree than with the quiet gratitude that one alcoholic feels for another when she is snatched back from the brink of oblivion.

© res 12/24/10

THE STORY OF Jon E

THE STORY OF Jon E

So today’s meeting turned into a celebration of Jon E’s eight years of sobriety. This was not just a time of noting (marking a landmark) but an acknowledgment of the way Jon E had gone from a gun toting cocaine addict to a much sought after community leader, in demand for his ubiquitous good works, speaking engagements as he was known in the past for his sloth and wasteful behaviors. The timbre of the meeting was that AA was the ballast that kept Jon E steady and the conduit that allowed him to conduct himself in a manner that he had always had within him but which had been sublimated by years of drug depleting decrepitude.

Having been born into a well known family, Jon E may have been rebelling against levels of expectations that his family may have had of him and so instead of growing gracefully into the role of community patron, he descended to that of community pervert and having succeeded beyond his wildest expectations he then ascended to the position of community hellion. The degree of forbearance by the community must have been great, since he had to have been excused for any number of misdemeanors, and even greater crimes. Only in a community as small as ours, in a family as notable as Jon E’s could this have occurred. It is remarkable how financial and social stature can shield people from the long arm of the law when, given different circumstances, skin color or social status, this would not have been tolerated in the same town.

But the time came when even his family could not turn the other cheek and had to ‘fire’ Jon E from the family’s business; his wife fired him from the family, and he was banished from the house. In fact he was exiled from the town and brought to a distant rehab facility to 'dry out' and then sent to another work facility to find out how to live a sober life. There he finally learned to live with the daily challenges that life throws at us, absorbing lessons most of us have long since integrated into our behaviors in childhood. And ever so slowly Jon E became a man, a father, a husband, a son and once again a valued partner in the family business.

We don’t come into AA hopeful. In fact we come hopeless, that is, completely devoid of hope. We have no expectation that we will ever become sober because every time we have tried to stay sober we have failed miserably. In the first and second steps of the 12 steps we learn that we are powerless over alcohol and we go over and over the history and the herstory of why we are drunks because no matter how we try to stop drinking, we always start again all the while desperate in the hope of trying to find out how this time we got here. We start again not because we want to. We start again because we don’t know why we started and failed to stay sober. We start again because we don’t know how we start again and we start because we often don’t remember the instances between the thought of thinking about picking up that first drink and waking up during or after that bout, which may be a day or more lasting hours or days or a week after that first drink.

We come into AA hopeless and fearful that we have finally reached the end of the road. How we mighty have fallen to have come through life (often through successful careers) only to find ourselves in a room full of drunks! But here is the mystery; because if you truly listen when you finally sit down in those first hours and days in AA, you will hear stories. And unlike the chaos and dissonance of experience that you feel in the world outside the rooms, in the rooms you will feel a kinship, a fellowship, a recognition that you have been here before. You will hear stories that are yours. You will feel feelings that are yours. You will hear thoughts that you have thought before. You will hear thoughts that you have thought but were afraid to express because you thought they sounded crazy enough to you ,let alone the rest of the world. Yet here, people were saying OUT LOUD the same crazy thoughts as you and they were not ashamed, not crying about them, in fact THEY WERE LAUGHING. THEY WERE LAUGHING AT THEIR OWN CRAZYNESS AND THEIR OWN THINKING KNOWING THE CRAZINESS OF THEIR OWN THINKING AND FINALLY APPRECIATING THE JOKE AS ONLY ONE ALCOHOLIC CAN APPRECIATE IT WITH ANOTHER.

We appreciate each others’ disability because we understand it at least to the point where we understand our complete powerlessness over it and our need to be ever vigilant in order to keep the temptation for the drink at bay one day at a time. We don’t pity each other, but we do empathize, for in our common narratives we have been through the depression, the fear, the mental and physical pain. We have been through the destruction of family, the economic destitution, the destruction of soul and the reintegration of the spirit in our lives.

We also finally understand that if we want to survive we must learn to trust other alcoholics to help us over the corrugations of life’s road. Why just other alcoholics? I can only speak for myself. I have friends both in and out of the program and my closest friends are not in the program. But when, for example, you need someone to get up to speed on a project they must come to the project with a lot of basic understanding so that when you start to describe the specific needs of your project there is a certain shared vocabulary that permits fluent communication.

That is what one AA does for another AA. We start by talking the same language which in this case is really experiential. It is based on emotional and psychopharmacological experiences that most friendships don’t share in the deep almost mystical sense that I talk about here. We sit and talk. We become supports, talk on the phone, sit in meetings together and organize our lives around certain principles of living. One of those principles is, of course, not to drink. But after that, what? We already know that just stopping hardly ever is a solution for us, for inevitably we will pick up again. So we have learned to change our lives from considerations of the material to the spiritual, from the property laden to abstract more principled and moral lives.

So the one basic principle of living for AA’s is not to drink any alcohol; we have come therefore to realize and understand that in order to live a truly sober life requires change on a truly grand scale, the requirement to change EVERYTHING in your life.

(But to keep it simple, we in AA like to say that you only have to change ONE thing in your life…EVERYTHING.)

Well that sounds daunting. But when you come to think about it, just how far did you get in life with your way of doing things? Waking up after days walking around in a blackout? Or did you wake up in your bed but not remember where you were the night before or whether waking up in bed today was really after last night’s debauch or was it days before? Where did you park your car? Or did you wake up in a hotel room wondering why the Eiffel Tower was dominating the scene out your window?

I have heard every one of those stories in the rooms, all of which were much more colorful than my own, but stories I was glad not to be able to tell. Those stories serve as a reminder that as colorful or complicated as my story got, there is a lot more writing that could go into the tale if I chose to do more experimentation with the grape.

So we have determined that working with others in the fellowship is the best way to stay sober. Everyone is an anchor for someone else if they want to be. There is, however, no written formula for these relationships, just the handed down wisdom of sponsor to sponsee.

And Jon E celebrates eight years today. He is fond of saying that he could not have done that without the help of the guys in the rooms and of AA in general. And if he is a model citizen today, it is at least due in a major part to the people in the rooms of AA, that happy group of drunks who give of themselves so that others can survive the ravages of alcoholism.

©May 9, 2010

THEY DO MAKE THEM LIKE THEY USED TO

THEY DO MAKE THEM LIKE THEY USED TO

Every now and then you really appreciate local merchants. I have been buying online for years for both convenience and for price and over the years surprisingly I have been able to purchase my woolen slacks from TravelSmith and Lands End. Both provided fine fabric combined with tailoring so that I could order online and voila it appears at my door several days later and I don't have the hassle of going to Syms or Macy's or Maxx's or any other place where I would have to purchase and then get the clothes tailored. And even if I could save big schkatols at Syms or Maxx's you can't get tailoring at the latter and Syms is a downer experience.

So here I am with wonderful gabardines and worsteds (maybe 10 pair of slacks) and I have lost about 2-3 waist sizes. Quelle bummer! We're talking about $700 of clothes, so what to do? Because one of the reasons I did not buy great fabrics off the racks was the typical rip off price at the local tailor which would amount to the price of the slacks themselves.

So here I find Steve...yeah Steve about 10 blocks away from me from an online site that says, "great, great price, professional tailoring, great customer service etc..." which makes me skeptical but I don't want to waste all that money invested in slacks because I may be destitute but I'll be damned if I'll look like a schlub!

Bring in Steve Mysirlidis. Ten years off the boat, maybe? Accent so thick the only thing I understand is the OK hand gesture and the reassurance that the job will be "A OK perfect" with full waist tailoring, leg tapering and bringing in the seat, shortening the legs AND he'll have it tomorrow. And then the price. Only $45. (ordinarily not bad for rebuilding a pair of pants) but I'm not so rich now so I hem (he hems, too I know) I haw, he drops the price to $35, I snort a bit and volunteer that I have a total of nine pair to do. His eyebrows go up, his wife smells Christmas Bonus money for the grandkids and we spit in the palms and strike a deal.

And what work he does! Better than the original pants! And I think, had I not received my B.A. in dickering in Mexico who would have thunk that I would have essentially nine pair of new pants for the new year? Not cheap, but not as expensive as new pants and much less hassle. And now I truly have a personal tailor who I can trust. Wow. Where has Steve been all my disheveled life? Well, probably back in Athens I guess. But I'm sure glad that he found his way to Norwalk for Christmas 2010. Another Christmas miracle happens.


© res 12/21/10

A LIFE EXAMINED

A LIFE EXAMINED
This is the time of the year when we reflect upon the year gone by, the progresses made, battles won, skirmishes lost. We take stock of our position on the battle field in the hope that an armistice if not a peace may be neigh. We remember with some trepidation the adage 'an unexamined life is not worth living'.

For us alcoholics the truck through the year from hard drinker to becoming solidly sober is a hard and difficult one. One harried with the dangers of recidivist backsliding. One fraught with thoughts that 'I could have just one drink and that wouldn’t hurt'. One where the notion of controlled drinking is the ever present siren song ready to thrust us upon the shoals of a fatal shore.

We are constantly challenged by sugar plum visions of drinking in happy times ( I can’t remember when that ever was) and how pleasant it would be to just experience those pleasant soirees. But truly there never were gentle soirees and the best of the happy times were when we remembered where the car was parked and who we were with the night before.

Yet we somehow harken back to these fictionally romantic times as if that would permit us to drink like normal people. Well we can’t and we never will. And that is the sober truth about the notion of 'controlled drinking'. If we could have controlled our drinking, we would not be in AA today. If we could control our drinking, we would not have had:

A) All those speeding tickets or DWIA’s
B) All those lost weekends
C) All those lost friends
D) All those lost and ruined marriages
E) All those lost cars and parking places
F) All those lost lives and souls.

Truly, controlled drinking is not in our nature, because our nature is not to be in control. And at the base of all this magical thinking is the reality of our constant striving to escape from ourselves, the need to dull the reality of life under the grit of a Morpheus substance.

Louisey, another blogger, has described the difficulty of living the 'unmediated and unbuffered' life as the 'unbearable nature of the untransformed consciousness'. How literally true that is. We can’t stand ourselves or life unless we dull our perception of life to protect us from harsh reality intruding upon our conscious existence.

That is, when we come right down to it, we all have to find a kinder and gentler way of living with ourselves. And I think the reason that we either succeed or fail in AA is that we finally come to an accommodation with ourselves if not to understand us in all our complexities, then at least to accept our complexity as part and parcel of who we are.

We may not always apprehend ourselves at the end of the day, but this accommodation allows us to exist, and with that permit us the time to ‘examine life to make it worth living.’

© res 12/20/10

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