His Brain Went Into Action and He Decided He Didn’t Want More of That – Don M.

I'm not sure, but my friend Billy and I were talking late last night, and we mentioned that he and I are on a life-and-death errand this morning. Because, see, I'm on a live-and death errand every day of my life, and those are not just words. I know when I first came around to Alcoholics Anonymous, I would hear old guys with gray beards and stuff say, you know, this thing's a matter of life and death and I'm just as close to a drink or closer than I was at my last drink. And I'd think, oh yeah, sure, you've been dry so long you're a fire hazard, old man. I want to tell you that's absolutely true. This thing that I've got is incurable, it's progressive and it's fatal. And not only do I have a physical allergy to alcohol and in my case things like it but not only do i have a physical allergy to alcohol which means that once i start drinking there's no telling what's going to happen you know i can't predict what's gonna happen but worse than that i've got a mental obsession if i just had the physical allergy i wouldn't have much of a problem because i was getting drunk one time and had that terrible hangover or got in trouble one timeand and my brain would have gone into action and i would said you know i don't want any more of that so i'm not going to do that again but i've got this mental obsession and the spot that that puts me in and i'm just as much in that spot as i was 15 years ago the spotthat that putsmein is that if i don' t do what the bookofalcoholicsanonymous tells me to do if i dont work on a daily basis to maintain my spiritual condition I'm powerless over that first drink. I've got a physical allergy that means that it's going to kill me if I do pick it up, and I've Got a mental obsession that means that I will pick it up if I don't do what I need to do to maintain my spiritual condition on a daily basis. So I am here for me, and I also hope that I'm here for you, because my sponsor explained to me that while the idea that this is a selfish program may be helpful when we're in early sobriety and understanding that we've got to put our sobrietry first before anything else, that this not a selfish problem at all, but rather it's a selfish disease. That what's wrong with me is that I'm so self-centered that on account of that disordered ego of man. On my own, I absolutely am incapable of being comfortable inside myself. That's my dis-ease. That is what is wrong. That creates the hole in my belly. And our book tells us just real specifically that if we are going to live, if the alcoholic is going to life, that the alcoholic has got to constantly try to be thinking of others and what they might be able to do to be helpful to others. So it's not a selfish program for me. It's a selfish disease, and it's a God-directed and another directed recovery from that illness. And that's what I'm hoping to do here this morning is to treat my illness and in the process try to share with you folks what's happened with me in my life that's allowed me to be alive today. I'm not going to be talking about, I don't expect, my program and your program. The reason I am not is that my original sponsor, who was a fellow by the name of Cherry Carpenter from Nashville, Tennessee, would correct me very quickly any time I said something about my program or your program, he had let me know that my program and his program had gotten us to the absolute bottom, had made us absolutely bankrupt as going human concerns, had taken everything on earth from us. And there's not my program and your program in here, he told me, there's just the program. And then he went on to explain to me what the program is. He explained to me that the program was not complicated at all, that the program's got numbers on it, that it's 1 through 12. And he explained that absolutely nothing else in Alcoholics Anonymous is the program of recovery, in fact, is the Program of Alcoholics Aonimous. He explained to me about the fellowship, the wonderful fellowship of AA, which is you folks and meetings and sponsors and conventions and things like this to some extent and all those wonderful things that are absolutely necessary they're absolutely necessary the fellowship is and thank god the only requirement for membership in the fellowship of alcoholics anonymous is that just for today that i've got a desire to stop drinking doesn't even have to be an honest desire you know it's all i've Got to do to be a full-fledged member there's nothing i can do to Be any more solidly a member of Alcoholics Anonymous than to wake up in the morning and just have a desire To stop drinking that's all I need And that punches my membership card for that entire day, and it's punched just as well as anybody else's. And in the time when that was all I could do, that was so much better than nothing that there was no comparison. So please don't hear me saying that it's no good to just go to meetings and nothing else. If that's all you can do, then that's a whole lot better than just staying out there on the street and doing nothing. But Cherry explained to me that the fellowship and the program are two really separate things, and that I can be a full-fledged membership of this fellowship for a week or for thirty years by latching on to it and going to meetings and making friends. And I didn't even get a sponsor, and I didn' t even be sponsoring people. And I could talk at conventions all over the country and work hard time in a treatment center. But he went on to explain to me that if I did that and didn't jump into these 12 steps to do what the book says to do, not learn what the books says to learn, because he made it real clear to me this deal of recovery is not a learning process. In fact, he would tell me over and over that we absolutely are unable to get sober on the basis of self-knowledge. he would go on and tell me that in fact knowledge without action was usually worse than no knowledge at all because that really made me miserable and really confused me that only the action was going to work and he he explained to me that steps one through nine are the recovery program of alcoholics anonymous in its entirety and he explained me that once i had done one through nine the way the book the way to book the the big book that you folks a lot of you've got in front of you and that I'll have in front of me in a minute here, that the way the book puts it, if I have done the first nine steps that way, then I will be in a state of recovery from alcoholism. I will for that time, for that moment, have recovered from alcohol. And I remember when he told me that because I'm going to share with you just a few minutes this morning. I'm supposed to tell my story tonight, so I'm sure not going to tell my story today, but I would like to let you folks know enough about me to let you know that I didn't get here because it gave me the hiccups. And I didn'T get here because my life was going along basically okay and I thought, well, gee, I need a few adjustments to make my life even better here, so Iím going to get into a spiritual program called Alcoholics Anonymous. Itís not the way it happened. I got here as a last-ditch alternative to death and I didn't think this would work. I didn' t think this would work but it was all I had left and I had been given a little glimmer of willingness to do some things that I didn'd understand that I did' n't agree with and I didn't think would work and that's how I got here but at any rate I'm going to tell you folks about that a little bit for a few minutes before we get started but what I'm telling you now is what Cherry Carpenter told me about those steps he explained that once I'd done those first nine steps the way the book said that i would have recovered from alcoholism i mean huh recovered that lord you know i've been around two and a half years now and and recovered if that's a sin to call myself a recovered alcoholic we are recovering alcoholics and he said well that's fine don if you want to call yourself a recovering alcoholic there's no no harm in it that i know of but just be aware that recovering alcoholic is a term that comes from treatment centers that it doesn't come from the big book that the big book talks about recovered alcoholics now i was quite a big book scholar before i got sober and i really was i had memorized large portions of it could argue quite effectively with some successfully sober people at least i thought quite effectively and and certainly i criticized literary style a lot the book just wasn't written in the style that someone of my stature would have written it so well when cherry said that i would be recovered from alcoholism after having done those first nine steps i was just you know oh man no we we can't say recovered and when when he said that the big book called us recovered alcoholics i said well cherry where did they hide that in the big books and he said don they hit it three times in the first paragraph to the foreword of the first edition and then he went on to point out some other places in the 1st 30 pages of the big book where they hit it, well, about a half dozen more times where they did it. And he pointed out that that foreword to the first edition and the first paragraph says that we are over 100 men and women who have recovered from a seemingly hopeless condition of mind and body. And then went on to point out that the next sentence, which is in italics, says that the purpose of this book is to show others precisely how we have recovered. And he took the opportunity to explain to me that that did not say in italics that the purpose of this book was to somehow transmit to us great philosophical principles that we could learn and somehow absorb and therefore be transported magically to a state of recovery. he pointed out that it said we're going to show you precisely what we have done then a little later on he showed me that the book says that by the time we're reading in here if we've really got the problem we're gonna be saying what do i have to do to get this thing and he pointed out to me that it is the purpose of this book to answer such questions specifically we will tell you what we have done so cherry made it clear to me that if i was going to get this recovery that i had to do the first nine steps the way the book said do them then he went right on to explain to him that reaching a state of recovery from my alcoholic malady that i've got this incurable progressive and fatal thing doesn't have any permanency to it at all that I've still got this incurable, progressive and fatal condition and that every day of my life after doing those first nine steps I have to live my life on 10, 11 and 12 so that I can maintain my spiritual condition and not lose my recovery and fall back into the pit and die of this incirable, progressive and fatal thing I've got and bottom line he went on to tell me that I could latch on to the fellowship and go to all these meetings and have a sponsor and be a sponsor, although I don't know what we would sponsor about because what Cherry taught me about sponsorship is that what a sponsor is is a guide through the steps. He certainly let me know that in his view a sponsor was not a financial advisor or a relationship advisor or anything of that nature, and I really tried to get him to talk to those things with him. I really thought he was being a poor sponsor and heartless because of his view. Billy and I were talking last night. Cherry Coffner didn't waste much time with me at all. He didn't fool with me a lot. Cherry taught me that there's way too much conversation around here, in his view, about talking to one sponsor. He thought there ought to be a lot more conversation about listening to one's sponsor. He explained to me that it wasn't his function to be there as a listening post for me to bounce things off him and try to sort it out myself he he let me know that if i could have sorted it out himself he assumed i would have done it in the 37 years before i got there with every aspect of my life in total wreckage so he didn't think i was going to do much good sorting it out myself and uh so he he said that i could latch on to the fellowship go to all these meetings and do all these other things and not do these steps and i might stay dry for a week and i might stay dry for 30 years depending on me but if I did that I would have absolutely no healing of what's really wrong with me this selfishness this self-centered this disordered ego that is the root of my alcoholism this inability to be comfortable inside myself except just exactly as I did those steps and he further went on to tell me that I could be doing all those things if I hadn't done the steps or wasn't living on 10 11 12 I wasn't even in the program of Alcoholics Anonymous. I was certainly in the fellowship. Thank God, any day I've got a desire to stop drinking. But if I'm not into those steps and doing those steps, and living those steps I am not in the program of Alcoholics Anonymous." Folks, thank God I am NOT a teacher. There aren't any teachers in Alcoholics Anonymous, and if there were any, I wouldn't want to be one because some folks that I have seen that looked like they might want to be teachers got drunk. The only thing I've got of any value to share with y'all today is what's happened to me. I probably will wind up expressing some things that are opinions. I don't mean to express any more of those than just sort of absolute decapitude, but if I do and it's my opinion, if it's not in the big book of Alcoholics synonymous, it is my opinion. You are free to take it or leave it. I don't have any idea whether what is my Opinion will work in recovery for you or not. What I do know is that what's in this book works for every one of us. And I hope that this morning, and I hope I can be a little bit like the fellows that Dr. Silkworth talks about in The Doctor's Opinions. I hope with regard to what I tell you about myself, what I tell you has happened to me and what I tell you that Alcoholics Anonymous has done for me, I hope it's such that you can rely on it absolutely, because that's my prayer this morning. I've actually got several prayers this morning, but that's one of them. And there are a couple of things I know for sure. I know that I can't help anybody in this room, and I truly know that. I don't know whether God will let me be a channel for some of you getting some help or not and I sure pray that that God will that that be that way that I will be a chance another thing I know believe I know is that not any of us are going to learn a thing today that'll do us a bit of good now we might hear some things if we're blessed that spur us into action that may change our life and propel us, rocket us into another dimension of existence. But the mere learning of something here today is not going to do me any good and it's not going to do you folks any good. I believe that with all my heart. The book tells us that the spiritual life is not a theory, we have to live it. Spirituality is not a state of mind, it's not a state-of-soul, spirituality is action. When I am acting out spirituality, I am spiritual. and I am not acting out spirituality, and I'm not spiritual, period, end of statement. If I'm claiming to be this and I m not living this, I simply am not that. I am what I'm living. I'm now what I am claiming to being, and not what I m feeling like I am. I m what I m living. The Big Book and the Twelve Steps may not be the only way to deal with alcoholism. I'm not going to be critical of anything because I don't have any criticism of anything, don't feel any criticism at all. But the reason I'm going to confine what I say to the Big Book of Alcoholics Anonymous is there are two reasons. Number one, there may be some other things out there that might work on alcoholism but i don't know about that i know this works i know that everybody who has thoroughly followed this path has gotten relief from this incurable progressive and fatal thing so no this works and the second reason is i tried a lot of those other things on my alcoholism and they didn't work this is the only thing that has ever worked for me i mean this is my only ticket this This is why this is a life-and-death errand for me this morning. This is my only link to life, this deal that seemed like such a flimsy read when I reached for it in April of 1981 and I reached for it with almost my last breath. When I reached that flimsey read, it wound up, in fact, being the hand of God. I also don't believe that we are going to be talking about a self-help program this morning folks and i don't believe that this is in any way a self-help book i believe that what alcoholics anonymous is rather is a god help program for helpless people because you see if i could have helped myself if i Could have figured out what was wrong with me and seen what to do and then been able to go do it why on earth would i ever have been here so this isn't a self-help program and i urge us all to approach it from that standpoint this morning that uh that what this book is the main the purpose of this book is to hook us into a higher power that will solve the problems that neither we nor any other human power can solve and the beauty of this book i mean the the need for this higher power is out here everywhere and everybody recognizes it, and there are all sorts of different ways of trying to get it. But for me as an alcoholic, this book doesn't just tell me that this is what I've got to have if I'm going to live, that I've gotta hook into a higher power. This book gives me a whole bunch of specific things that if I do those things, that it guarantees me that I'll make that connection with that higher power, or rather that higher power will make that connexion with me, and it'll be here. So that's the beauty of the formula of it for me, because this gives me something to do guarantees me that it will happen. Incidentally, a lot of the things that my sponsor told me in the first week that I was sober, it's taking me years to realize what they mean. And that word realize has gotten very important to me in the last year or so. And I'm supposed to be kind of a wordsmith. I've liked words all my life. And it's amazing the things I don't know about words even though I've thought all my life I was so good with them. It's just to have been within the last year or two that the word realize has gotten real to me, that it's gotten clear to me that the Word realize is from the word real. You know, it's a form of the word Real. And when I have realized something, then that has in fact become real to Me. and that's so different than knowing it. There are things that I have known for years and years in recovery that I had not realized, that had not become real to me. And Billy and I were talking last night, I think usually that's because I hadn't done them. It may be impossible for me to realize something that I haven't put into action and done. I may intellectually know it, but I haven' t realized it. It hasn' t become real for me until I've put it into action. But the reason I was mentioning that was, for the first five or six years that I was sober, I had no idea on earth why Cherry Carpenter, my sponsor, made the point to me over and over that the Big Book talks about being a recovered alcoholic after having done those first nine steps rather than recovering alcoholics. And after some years, I believe I have realized what Cherry was doing and why he was doing it that way. Number one, he was doing it simply because that's the way the book did it, and regardless of what he may have thought about it, that's what he was supposed to pass on to me. He wasn't supposed to pass on his opinions and his ideas but rather what the book said and his best judgment of what that meant. The second reason is that Cherry knew that I've got as good a strong a dose of alcoholism as about anybody, I guess. And he knew that I would look for every excuse not to face life on life's terms and live life as normally as a person can live it. And Cherry knew that if I could grab hold of this idea that I'm going to remain a little somehow emotionally crippled recovering alcoholic for the rest of my life, and I've got to be pampered. And I can't do these hard jobs, and I can deal with these negative people because I'm an alcoholic and I'm recovering." Cherry knew that I would grab hold of that and I'd be sitting in discussion meetings whining just exactly that way five or ten years down the line. What Cherry Carpenter wanted me to understand was that once I had done one through nine the way the book says do them, and then was living my life one day at a time on 10, 11, and 12, that I was just at least as equipped to face life on life's terms as a quote, normal person who had never had alcoholism. And further, if I were not that well-equipped, then I'd better go back and start over because I didn't do it right. And that's been extremely helpful to me because Cherry was right. Any crutch, any crutch that I can grab hold of to keep from going ahead and getting out there and doing what needs to be done, I'll grab hold of it." So Cherry was trying to take that crutch away from me. Also, I want to let you folks know that anything that I talk about today in the way of the steps and the spiritual recovery. I'm going to try real hard not to talk about anything that I haven't done, and that I don't do. But I also want to make it real, real clear I haven' t been able to do any of these things with anything approaching perfection. And that's so important to me. See, all my life I've been one of these nutty perfectionists. And when I say nutty, perfectionist, my perfectionism usually resulted in me not doing anything, because I would either think that I couldn't do it perfectly and not start, or I would start on it and I'd make one mistake and say, Oh, the devil with it, that's completely out the window, you know, so I'm not going to try it anymore. this whole journey has been for me, the whole journey of sobriety and the spiritual growth that God has let take place in me. It's been a matter of stumbling a couple of steps in the right direction, forgetting what I was doing and what was going on, and falling on my rear end and getting back into self-will, and getting up and remembering, Oh yes, I'm supposed to be trying to do this God's way and not mine, and stumble another couple of steps and fall on my butt again and get up and dust myself off again and stumble and go on and on and on. And, folks, the good news is that that seems to be perfectly acceptable to my higher power. My higher power does not require perfection of me, nor does my higher power require consistency, meaning that I'm doing it all the time. What my higherpower does require of me is persistence, that willingness to fail sometimes a hundred times a day. There have been a lot of days in recovery when I have spiritually failed a hundred time, and when a hundred times I've said, Oh yeah, I did that wrong. You know, I'm not supposed to be coming from there, I'm supposed to come from God's way of doing things, and get up and stumble. And doing it many times when my brain was telling me that I absolutely had just screwed up so bad that it was all hopeless. Because, you see, I got another real deadly thing in me. And what that is, is this crazy idea that somehow God's forgiveness was a one-shot deal. I needed so much forgiveness when I got here for me to even begin for my life to get on track. I needed so much forgiveness that something in me believed that once God made that wonderful, gracious forgiveness of all those terrible things that I had done, and that I set out on this deal of recovery that I have used up all of my rope. That God has said, Okay Don, just this once you've burnt this thing up now, partner, and you'd better stay on that straight and narrow and don't step off over there, I must squish you like a bug because I've had enough. God. My God's forgiveness is an endless well. It's an endless well, and it's with me every second of every day. And it's with me in the smallest of things as well as in the biggest of things. And my God's Forgiveness is with me in every instant. It is with me on one word spoken badly that I need to admit I'm wrong on or make a quick little tenth step amend on it. It is with me on the big things in my life where I've gotten off track and been off track for two years in sobriety. God's forgiveness is always there with me. In fact, the way that it helps me to think about it, my God will never keep me from painting myself in the corner. God is never going to take the paintbrush away from me, and God is never gonna hand me a little map in advance and say, Don, here, this is the way you're supposed to be painting next tuesday you know god's going to let me keep the paintbrush and he's going let me paint myself in the corner but the good news and the forgiveness part of it is there's no corner that i can paint myself into regardless of how hopeless that corner seems and lord knows i've spent so much time in corners not only not knowing how to get out of them not knowing where the corners were and not knowing How I got there but the forgiveness deal is that if any moment I'm willing to lay that paintbrush down and say to my God, hey, hey Dad, I'm sorry. I've done this again. Please help me. As soon as I lay that pain brush down, my God is there and I'm okay. And that's the forgiveness. And I need it so much. So please don't think that I'm coming from any perfection up here. In fact, the probabilities are that I'm up here this morning because of my imperfection in recovery, and I mean that with all my heart. I mean it with all of my heart, because there have been so many failures, so many stumblings and fallings, that I've had to devote so much energy to it in order to keep on getting up and brushing myself off and going on. And I doubt that I would have gotten the call from Al to be here had it not been for all the stumbling and falling that I have done in recovery. Now that's with regard to the spiritual growth. I do want to say that there are a couple of things that have happened absolutely consistently since April 9, 1981, which is by the way my dry date. And the biggest and in my view the most important, by a million miles, is that one day at a time since April 8, 1981 I haven't had a drink of alcohol or any mind-altering drug. The second thing that hasn't changed, and I'll get to it in a little while when we talk about the second step, I expect. But to my knowledge, since April of 81, I haven't missed a morning getting on my knees and I haven t missed a night getting on me knees. The other things, though, they all come and they go as a matter of persistence with them. Also as we start talking about the steps, the steps aren t called the steps by accident. They could have called them the Twelve Principles, the Twelve Tenets. They could call them any number of things, but they didn't. They called them The Steps and then they numbered them. And my sponsor and other folks where I got sober explained to me that there was a real good reason for that, because steps are built one on the other. It doesn't make much sense to have a staircase with a third step and an eighth step if you don't have all the steps in between. And you need to step on Step 1 to get to Step 2, and you need the step up on Step 5 to get to Step 6. And they explained to me that that's exactly the way these steps work, that they're interlocking. And for that reason that I certainly did not need to get ahead of myself, that I didn't need to be thinking about Step 5 while I was doing what I needed to do on Step 2. I certainly didn't need to think about Step 9 when I was trying to do a Step 4 because I'd get ahead of myself, and I'd stop where I was. And it was about that time they told me a little story about the nature of lots of alcoholics that I'm going to take just a minute and tell you, because it got the point across to me that I didn't need to be jumping ahead. This Alkey is out on a dark country road one night, and he had a flat tire. And he looks, and He doesn't have a jack in his trunk. He said, Oh my gosh, what am I going to do? I'm out here, and got this flat tire, and don't have jack, and it's the middle of the night. and he looks way, way up the road and he sees a little bitty light of a farmhouse. He says, well, maybe. So he starts walking. He walks a little further and says, well, what if it's really not anybody at home? You know, just left a light on them. He walks another further and he says, well, but if they're at home and they won't come to the door. Walks a little farther and he said, well, why don't you go ahead and say, well what if the guy's home and he comes to the store but he hasn't got a jack? Walks another further and says well, what if a guy's there and he's got a jacket but he won't let me borrow the jack. He walks a little further and says, well, what if God lets me borrow that jack? And I walk all the way back here and the jack won't fit. And about this time he's on the front porch so he knocks on the door and after a minute this nice old farmer with his old hammy cap on comes to the door all sleeping and says can I help you sir? And the alcoholic says, I don't want to borrow your G.D. Jack anyway. So if I start jumping ahead when I'm in the process of doing the steps, I may decide that I don' t want to borrow the jack anyway and stop. So I need to just stay where I am on those steps. In approaching, I did tell you a little bit about how I got here. I told you that I got sober, by the grace of God, April 9, 1981. For a year and a half of the two years before that, I lived on the street. I lost everything. I was a lawyer. I am a lawyer again now, by grace of god, but I lost my law license. I lost only child, didn't see her for over a year. I lost literally everything materially that one can use or lose. I had a horrible accident while I was completely blown out of my mind. I drove the car off the road at 130 and tore my body all to pieces and lost the main artery in one lower leg, crushed both knees, broke both legs, separated my pelvis and severed my urethra so that I didn't have a urinary function for over a year. Had a half dozen major surgeries during the first year. Was in the hospital for six months that first year, didn't even consider stopping drinking and drugging couldn't consider it would lay in the hospital bed and say intelligent things like fella that i had my friends bring me in booze and more dope than the doctors were giving me and i would lay on that hospital bed and say intelligence things like fellas you know anybody can quit drinking when the going gets a little tough takes a man to lay in there with it when the bills start coming in and then i'd talk to him about the fact that a man ought not be out there doing the cram if you couldn't do the time, because, you see, on my own I am absolutely powerless. I'm absolutely powerless from the first time I got drunk at 12 or 13 years old until I got sober at 37 years old. The alcohol and things like it had been the only relief I had ever been able to get from that inability to be comfortable inside myself. So in the bottom line, it simply did not matter what it cost. I got sober in April of 1981 not thinking that I could live, not thinking there was anything to live for. When I was sober two or three months, I thought about it this morning. Alex has been so kind and sweet as has Al and just everybody. You folks are just great over here. We went to breakfast at Friendly's, and that reminded me of Shoney's. And I remembered in the two or 3 months after I would be sober that I would sit at Shoney after the meetings. And somewhere in that process, I had a lot of things happen, like I went for a year and a half and didn't sleep in a bed except when I was in an institution, and I was on the asylum 18 times in two and a halftime years of alcoholism and drug addiction. And two or three months sober, I would sit around Shawnee's, and I would watch people using their knife and fork to cut up meat because, you see, I have lost that skill somewhere. It had just gotten lost. I couldn't say I forgot it because I don't know that you've learning. It's almost automatic, you know. And I was too embarrassed in my sobriety to say to anybody, will you help me somehow? The ability to use a knife and fork has evaporated. I lived for a year and a half before I got sober with the absolute conviction that I had to die of alcoholism because this program would not work for me. And i lived every day with that conscious conviction when I was on the street, because most of the asylums that I was in, and I don't use the word asylum to be funny. A lot of the places I was in were called treatment centers, a lot were called psychiatric hospitals, but asylum is fine with me. Bill Wilson uses that term, and my mother used that term when I was a child. But I'm not being derogatory, because treatment centers have helped a world of people, and I believe they helped me. I believe I needed every one of those spots to get to where I could recover. what would happen to me during that year and a half. And I don't know, incidentally, Louisville, Kentucky is where I'm from, and Louisville was where I had practiced law, and I've never been able to reconstruct what month or even what season of the year I left Louisville. That's all just lost in there. But during the time that I was on the street, I would be between these asylum visits and i would sometimes go to a lot of aa meetings between those visits so i knew what the program said you know the knowing and the realizing again but this alcoholic malady this disorder of the ego that is the alcoholism is the only illness i know of that talks to us and some folks say that their alcoholism tries to kill them by what they tell them and maybe so but But the way I look at it, I don't think my alcoholism ever tried to kill me for a very simple reason. I don' t think my alchoholism cares whether I live or die or cares whether you live or die or anything else. I think my alcoholicism has only got one reason for its existence, and that's to somehow increase its chances of getting that next drink. So what my alcoholisim would tell me during that period of time, I would listen and say Al would tell how Alcoholics Anonymous had saved his life and changed his life. my brain would say, yeah, I know it works for you, Al. But, Al, you don't know how intelligent I am. And you don'T know what a broad stage I've played on. And you DON'T understand how my tentacles have just reached so far and touched so many in the complexity of my life. And you Don'T understand, Al., that I can't accept this little myth of a higher power like you folks can. You know, my intellectual ancestors created God to keep your intellectual ancestors in line. And it's nice that you folks can accept this, but of course someone with my brilliance absolutely can't. And you don't know anything at all about the fact that I see things so much more clearly than ordinary people am. And you Don't Understand That I Feel Them So Much More Acutely. My God, my soul is just too big for my body. You know, I just am wounded by my own understanding. And it won't work for me because I'm so magnificent magnificent and by that of course i wouldn't say that out loud but this is what my brain's doing and by the time i get kind of misty-eyed about the fact that it would work for y'all in your simplicity and and of course it couldn't work for me in my magnificent isolation uh and then the very next instant alex or ross would tell me how alcoholics anonymous had saved their life and changed their life and my brain would say yeah but you don't know about the parts of me that are missing and always have been you don't know that i've never been able to be consistently responsible about one single thing in my entire life and you don'T KNOW THAT I'VE NEVER BEEN ABLE TO LOVE ONE SINGLE THING EVER NOT REALLY IN MY WHOLE LIFE AND YOU DON'T KNOW That anything in my life that looks like it was okay in any way that looks Like It Was Any Kind Of Okay Is Some Kind Of Pack Of Lies And A House Of Cards And You Don'T Know That I'Ve So Destroyed Everything In my path to getting here that there's nothing for me to get sober with or for or on you don't know that i've burned everything in my path and i've salted the earth there just isn't enough left of me to gets up but to get silver so it won't work for me because I'm so bad and then the very next instant it wouldn't work from a because I was so great and that's not that that's not a mystery to me because you see like said I believe my illness has just got that one purpose for existing. And what it could tell me when I was on the streets 16 years ago today was that there was some situation, however small, in Don Major's life that day for which these twelve steps and you folks and a loving God were not the total solution, that something needed just a little extracurricular adjustment. Because if my illness could get me to believe that 16 years ago, it had just gotten a heck of a jump on that next drink. And guess what didn't tell me here 15 years sober that best increases its chance of getting that next drink? You got it. That right here on May 11, 1996, there's some part, some little part of Don Major's life that's just a little bit outside the ordinary here. And these 12 steps that are the program for recovery and you folks that are The Fellowship of Alcoholics Anonymous. And my loving God can't take care of all this. Don's going to have to go outside that to take care just this one little thing. Because let me tell you, if my illness can get that lie over on me today, it just got a heck of a jump on that next drink. Steps 1 and 2, I was taught and I believe with all my heart, are different from the rest of the steps. And the way they are different is that one and two involve the reaching of conclusions. All the rest of the steps I was taught and have found in my own experience require action, they require specific action. The book tells us exactly what to do. But one or two don't. One and two require that we reach some conclusions. In fact, I've been sober some time when it finally dawned on me, you know, the words that immediately follow the part of chapter 5 that we call how it works and that we read before meetings, the ABCs are being convinced we were at step three. Well, being convinced of what? seems obviously being convinced of the conclusions that make up steps one and and steps two in that i'm powerless over alcohol like to have killed me because i had a lot of trouble reaching the full conclusion on being powerless over alcohol now some of some of you fellas are are fairly young and i had intellectually decided that i was an alcoholic by the time i was 15 years old because i began drinking when i was 12 or 13 and i drank alcoholically for the first time i ever drank and alcohol was the center of my life for 25 years until i got sober and by the time iwas 15 years old i intellectually knew i wasan alcoholic but see my alcoholism was going to be something that i could live with in fact it was kind of romantic you know my alcoholism was just sort of a result of of all this compassion and creativity inside me and my specialness and because i was just so different from everybody and i saw those things more clearly and i felt them more deeply you know life other people couldn't possibly be feeling and and seeing all these things that i was uh and i just got wounded by all that and and i knew that alcoholism was going to cause some inconvenience you know it was going to be kind of like having a withered arm or something like that and probably even would shorten my life 10 or 15 years but you know when you're 15 or 20 years old who on earth wants to live to be 50 years old anyway for God's sake you know what good is a 50 year old person and why would anybody want to be that old so it didn't bother me much it was gonna shorten my wife some but you see the mistake that I was making that very nearly killed me over the years was this idea that even though I had alcoholism, that somehow I could live with alcoholism. It wasn't until the reality of alcoholism being incurable, progressive, and fatal got through to me on a personal basis, meaning that everybody who ever had this thing we call alcoholism in the history of the universe has either recovered from it or they've died from it. No exceptions, period. And it wasn't until I accepted that I wasn't going to be the first one in the history of the world that ever fell through the cracks, that it was in fact incurable, progressive and fatal for me. So that was part of my powerlessness over alcohol, that just intellectually admitting that I was an alcoholic didn't get me anywhere. I took that and just went on with all sorts of things, but that didn't help me a bit. It wasn't until I truly admitted my powerlessness over alcohol, and in my case, the things like it. Because I had a real good round of that, and I can't tell my story without telling that. But during those 18 trips to the asylum, part of the time I'd be in there at the diagnosis of alcoholism, part of time I would be in their diagnosis of drug addiction, and I would sit in there when I was shaking out the alcohol and going through all that withdrawal that got to where it took three or four days for me to be physically able to sit up in a chair after I got separated from alcohol the phenomenon of craving that the big book talks about had progressed so far in me and I think damn this alcohol's got me man I get it out of my system this time I am powerless over this stuff so I'm not going to put any more in it and besides that I can chip on the dope and that doesn't hurt anything you know man that doesn' t do this to me that doesn''t make me this sick that doesn'T make me where I wake up at 4 o'clock in the morning throw a brick through a glass window to get Listerine to drink you know that doesn ''t do this to me so i'm gonna chip on dope i'm going to be okay so i'd get out of this asylum start chipping on a little dope three days i'd be drunk and drunk in a coupe then they'd have me in this asylum bring me off some kind of dope and i'd sit there and think you know i was doing all right when i was just drinking before i got through with all this dope uh i believe i get back i'm gonna go back just drinking the way i did for years you know and and that's what messed me up so all this other stuff so i might get out and i'm just gonna drink like got some sense and i'll be okay and i'd get out and give me three days and i was back on everything i'd get my hands on and that went on and on and so so i had to accept that yes i was powerless over alcohol in my case i'm powerless over all man-dalking drugs because it all winds up for me back in the same place uh i also had to except in this one really like to get that i'm powerless over alcohol whether or not i've got it in my body now again when i in the latter years of my drinking when they'd start hospitalized me when i had physically lost the ability to stop drinking once i had started drinking where something had to intervene to separate me from alcoholism wasn't any problem figure out that once i got any alcohol in my body that i was powerless and i thought for a long time that that's what this powerlessness over alcohol meant that once i started drinking i couldn't stop well The problem with that is, that was really all that was wrong with me. All I've got's a physical allergy, so all I've gotta do is get it out of my system one time and anybody with any sense is not going to pick up the next one. Right? Problem. The book makes it real clear to me that my alcoholism is not only that physical allergy that my alcholism is also the mental obsession. It also goes on to say that even though we alcoholics are physically and mentally different from our fellows, that the main problem centers in our minds. And it goes on several times and winds up by saying once more or once again, the day is going to come when I am absolutely not going to have any mental defense against that first drink. So you see, I had to conclude not only am I powerless over it once I start, I'm powerless over the first drink. My powerlessness over the 1st drink is not as dramatic as my powerlessness of the 2nd one or the 22nd one. You know, that's a real dramatic phenomenon of craving that set in and there I go. But eventually, it might take 3 days, it may take 2 weeks, it might 5 years. In my case, don't think it's much shot if it takes 5 years but if i don't do this program of recovery steps one through nine in order to get my recovery and then live on 10 11 and 12 a day at a time see that's why i started out by saying that folks i'm on life and death errand this morning because this is absolutely true of me today and every day of my life if i dont do these things to do something about what's wrong with me first this disordered ego this inability to be comfortable inside myself i'll pick up that first drink i'm powerless over and once i pick it up that deadly cycle starts over in me again and i know i've got another drunk in me but i really sincerely sincerely don't think i've got another recovery i really think that for me to let down on maintaining my spiritual condition so that that thing inside me that disordered ego gets messed up enough again that i do reach for that first drink that i haven't maintained my spiritual condition so as to get that defense from my higher power that once i picked it up i believe i'm a dead man in a real short period of time so my choices are to keep on doing this thing or die a mad dog death and i don't have any other choices i either keep doing this this morning and i die a bad dog death i want to tell you that's a beautiful choice that sounds like kind of a negative thing this morning but as we talk about living sober later on this afternoon when i was looking at sobriety see i lived my whole life in terror of being bored oh i did i'd get wasted on tuesday scared i was going to be bored on thursday because you see there were a lot of things in the first place i was so intelligent and interested in myself it was very easy to bore little donnie and we didn't want to bore little donny and and it was just an awful thing to be bored and i lived in my life in fear of it And I would look out at folks living their lives clean and sober and living the way sober people do. And my reaction to looking at that, I think I'd rather go on a diet of alcoholism, you know, because God just looks so dull. You know, why would you want to be alive if it were that way, for God's sake? But see, that's that illness talking to me again, that illness making the unreal appear real to me and the real appear unreal. Because the fact has been this, and please believe me on this, if you don't believe me on another thing, nobody could have been more devoted to seeking out excitement than I was. My friend Billy that's traveling with me is back there nodding his head I think Billy was probably just as devoted to seeking at the excitement we found us some excitement folks and we were always looking for it but the beauty is living those 37 years in terror of being bored and really spending so much time being bored Since April the 9th, 1981, which is my dry date, I have not been bored for one heartbeat. I have spent one heartbeat bored. My life has been so full, so joyful, so wonderful, I've lived basically in another dimension that I didn't even know existed, and it's so much more exciting than that other thing. In fact, my business—I'm back practicing law now—my business and working with newcomers and occasionally things will take me back into those old worlds. And like when I walk back into a bar now, for whatever reason, it's like I went to take a pee 15 years ago and came back and ain't nothing changed. People are still sitting there telling the same lies, telling one another how great they are. And I look at that and you know what my overwhelming... I don't want to drink. I don' t have any of those negative kind of things. my overwhelming reaction to that is boredom. It is the most boring thing on earth, and I can't imagine that I spent all those years living in that thinking that was the exciting way to live. But anyway, I just kind of wanted to digress on that a little bit. Well, one thing I did want to say that I didn't know, knowing that I was an alcoholic but not understanding about the incurable progressive and fatal with regard to me i started practicing law in louisville in 1968 and i had some success early on and i decided that i felt sorry for the alcoholics who didn't have the intelligence and the strength of will to handle their alcoholism so i started donating some money to what was then the only drying out place in louiseville a place named pleasant grove and they wound up remodeling the recreation room and named it Major Hall after me. And this was in the very early 70s. In the late 70s, I was kicked out of there twice for getting drunk on Listerine and Pop-Off Vodka while they were trying to drive me out and it was still named Major Hall when they were kicking me out of it. So, you know, alcoholism... See, I had the idea that even though I had alcoholism that I'd be able to live with it like I said that somehow i could outsmart it um outrun it maybe bribe it you know but that some way there had to be a way to live with alcoholism and it wasn't until the truth got through to me there's no way to Live With Alcoholism if we've got alcoholism it's like being pregnant and i haven't ever been pregnant thank goodness but but i know you don't look the same at 20 minutes pregnant that you do at eight months pregnant and I suspect you don t feel the same but you re just as pregnant you know if you're 20 minutes pregnant and you don't believe you're pregnant just wait eight months and don't do anything and you know you'll see and i believe that alcoholism is exactly the same way once we got it it's flat there you know and it's going wherever it's gone and we got the choice whether we go ahead and ride it into the gates of insanity or death or whether we get off on the recovery and we don't have any other choices you know it's just my only question is what the timetable is. But anyway, I just wanted to throw that in. But on the powerlessness conclusion, I also had to get it through my head that the step says that we are powerless over alcohol. It doesn't say we are powerless over our elbow because for a long time I thought AA wasn't working when I was going through that two-and-a-half-year period of the asylums and in and out in the streets because there wasn't anything in AA making me magically not want to drink. And I thought that if this thing was going to work, it was goingto have to start changing immediately the way I was inside so I didn't want to drank. Well, the bad news on that, folks, was that finally in order to get sober, I had to accept that neither God nor any of you people were ever going to knock a drink out of my hand. And the real bad news was that at 37 years old, which was how it was when I got sober. If I was going to live, I had to do the first mature things I had ever done in my life. And that was for a while, a day at a time. I had be willing one day at the time for that day, with God's help that I didn't even at that point believe in. But I had been willing with that God's help that didn't believe in, and with your help I didn' t much believe in you either because I believed I was so different that what was true for you couldn't possibly be true for me, that I wasn't going to drink or take dope if my butt fell off. And the bad news was that for, in my case, a couple of months, one day at a time, I had to sit there and think, well, here it is. If I don't do something, I'm going to explode and splatter all over the walls and ceilings. And instead of doing what I'd always done and run out in my terror trying to make me feel better, because see, that's what this whole thing's about. That's what this whole alcoholism is about, is that the way little Donnie felt was the center of the universe, and I was willing to sacrifice myself anything or anybody in the world so little Donnie would feel better God knows we don't want a little Donny to feel bad you know he can do anything on earth terrible but we don' t want little Donney feeling bad because the way little Donni feels is the center of the universe you know and if little Doni's going to do the right thing Lord knows we want little Dolly to feel like doing the right things you know we wouldn't want him to do the right think just cause it's the right thin because what we're all concerned with is little out his feelings and the way he feels. So what I had to do, I had to sit there and for the first time in my life I had the thought and the feelings hit just as hard, yeah, I'm going to explode, I can't stand this, I've got to have it. And I had said, well, we're going to sit here and see if I explode. And just sit there and see if I exploded and blew up all over the walls and say the prayers and contact the person in Alcoholics Anonymous and talk to them. And it never did explode. the good news on that was that about two months into master braxton didn't feel like it was working in fact if i had waited until a.a felt like it wasn't working i would have been dead and rotted 15 years ago uh and it sure didn't be like his work in fact i was in so much pain that i went into a liquor store there in nashville tennessee where i had gotten sober and i was two months sober but enough of it had sunk in i walked into the liquor store praying to myself God, please don't let me drink. God, Please don't Let Me Drink. God,Please Don't LetMeDrink. God,please don'tletmedrink. Give me two pints of pop-off. God,please don'tLetmedrink. I got my two pincers of pop off and I walked outside with them. And I had one of those situations where God spoke to me. You know, Bill Wilson said one time, If you're ever out in the woods and you hear God talking to you, call your sponsor. And I believe that. The way God has always spoken to me has been through you folks, through the literature and through my own thoughts and feelings. And as I walked out of that liquor store, it hit me that if I drank that pop-off, that I didn't have anywhere to go except that mad dog death, or if I was real, real lucky to be able to drag back into an AA room somewhere one more time after all those humiliating times with my tail between my legs and say one more thing, I still didn't get this, will you guys tell me one more time and i just didn't want to do that i just didn't wanna do that so i hid that vodka in some high grass around the road sign just in case that aa crap didn't really work i know where it was and i could get some relief and i went back to the clubhouse there in nashville and i ran into a fellow by the name of gene crotch who's dead now and and gene said well don you know you started a couple of months ago acting as if on this praying deal and and and lo and behold for the first time in your life you hadn't had a drink for or the first time since you were 12 or 13, you hadn't had a drink in a couple of months. I said, why don't you add to that prayer? Just take a few seconds and add to that prayer, not only for you to get through the day without drinking and drugging, but if it's God's will to please let you get through without wanting to do it. And then add to that prayer at night, not just not only thanking God for getting through without doing it, but thanking God for getting though without wanting to do it. And I knew that wouldn't work, but I had a little bit of willingness there, so I added it anyway. And it worked that next day, and it's worked every day and every night since then. And it's been a part of my prayer since then, but I don't think I've had a thing removed. I think my compulsion is down there just as mean and just as thirsty and just as deadly. In fact, I think it's 15 years meaner, thirstier, and deadlier than it was the last time I checked on it. But for 15 years now, almost 15 years, I haven't had to feel the bite of that compulsion to drink because each and every day god has granted that simple request the priest let me get through without doing it or wanting to do it now the conclusions on the unmanageability now those are things that have have developed for me because see when i got my first exposure to alcoholics anomaly it was absolutely no trouble to admit that my life was a mess and that I had managed terribly. And let me suggest that not too many people get to a meeting of Alcoholics Anonymous unless they're going with a relative or friend. Not too many people get through a meeting of Alcoholics Anonymous, unless their life is a mess, and they have managed terribly." And I thought that when I admitted that my life was a mess and I had manged terribly, that I admitted my life as unmanageable. Oh, that's so far from the truth. I haven't even begun to admit that my life is unmanageable when I've done that, because if my problem is that my wife is a mess because I haven' t managed well enough, you don't have to be a rocket scientist to come up with the solution. The solution is not to go casting around out here for some sort of supernatural power to start intervening and taking care of my life. The solution it quite simply to manage better. So if my problem is my life's a mess because I haven't managed well, I haven' t done step one and I certainly don' t need step two. Why on earth am I going to go looking around for this supernatural power to intervene in my life if all I need to do is just get a grip, tighten up a little bit and start managing a little better? It was given to me that having an unmanageable life is like having an undrivable car. you know if i'm driving poorly i can pay more attention to my driving and i can maybe take some driving courses and and i may solve that problem you know i may get the driving okay and everything's fine i can do that by working on my driving but if i've got an undrivable car i can go to every advanced driver school in the country i can spend every waking moment working on my driving and I'm not going an inch it won't address the problem at all because my car is undrivable and folks I believe now that when I admit my life's unmanageable I'm admitting that this car is undrivable and what that means when I truly reach that conclusion in the first step that means that not only is my life a mess it means that because of what's wrong with me even though it looks like I should have been able to prevent it from becoming a mess that's not true the truth is that because of what's wrong with me i could not on my own have prevented my life from becoming a mess and on my home i can do absolutely nothing about cleaning up the mess that is my life that day now when i've done that i've admitted not just that i wasn't driving that car well i've committed to cars i'm driving i've submitted that my life is unmanageable and then and only then have i admitted that perfect dilemma that is step one step one is an absolutely perfect dilemma i'm sitting here with a physical allergy to alcohol but if i pick up a drink a series of things are going to happen that that's don't kill me you know either sooner or later it's going to kill me i'm going to die the mad dog dead i'm setting here with the mental obsession that absolutely ensures that on my own i'm gonna pick up the first drink that i'm just as powerless over the first one as i am on the second over the second one or the 11th one my life is a mess that i couldn't have prevented from happening because of what's wrong with me and worse i can't do anything on earth and no human power can do anything to help me clean this life up now that's a dilemma folks when i get there then i see why step two is built on step one, because I don't have anywhere to go but that higher power. I don' t have anywhere to go. Once I've reached those conclusions, then I start testing it around and say, No, human power can do it. Maybe, just maybe. And the conclusions in that second step, you know, the second step doesn't involve any conclusion that a power greater than myself will help me do a thing about my life. The second step is just concluding that, Well, there's something out there or at least i'm willing to act like i believe there's something out that was what the conclusion had to be for me that has got the power to clean up this mess not that it will but i've got this terrible dilemma and man just finding something that's got the parent i'll worry about counting it into doing it later you know that's the way my brain works just that just just the idea that there might be something that can clean it up is such a relief from that awful dilemma of step one that i'm open to it hey yeah man maybe you know this really seems off the wall and i doubt it but maybe it's the best shot i've got and and that's that conclusion of it and the book tells us and and we agnostics that's the only conclusion that's necessary just that willingness to believe that willingness to act like we believe that it's there the second conclusion in in step two is a simple conclusion and that is that we have been insane because it says that that power can restore us to sanity or could restore us the sanity and when this book talks about sanity and insanity you know all my life I thought that sanity and insanity were a state of man you know I thought it when I felt crazy I was crazy and when I fell saying I was saying and I really began to learn that that wasn't true a long time ago in fact i was in the asylum one time about 1979 the guy told me he said you know don they don't put you in the asylum for being crazy and i went huh because they sure put me in there for being lazy and they said no no they put you into the asylum for acting crazy so they don t let you out of the asylum from being sane they let you outta the asylum for acting sane and i got things that well i know that s true because i ve gotten out a lot of psalms and i wasn't saying at all and when the book talks about sanity it's talking about sane behavior and whenthebooktalksaboutinsanity it'stalkingaboutinsanebehavior and folks that's real good news because see i don't have any button that i can push or flip switch that icanflip to make myself start feeling sane or stop feeling insane but i've learned a great and beautiful truth being crazy is harmless uncomfortable as blazes but harmless won't hurt a thing in fact after these years i've got points where someday i can be crazy as a loon people don't even know it and i've earned that if i but you see what kills me is acting crazy i can be just as crazy as alone if i don't act crazy it's uncomfortable but it won't hurt anything and before long it'll get funny before long i'll be laughing about how crazy i was but folks when i act crazy sometimes it takes an awful long time for it to get funny there's some things i did 30 30 years ago that aren't funny yet but they were crazy actions and that was such a beautiful revelation to me so that second conclusion in in two is just simply that that uh that that i am that i have been crazy um tell you what i think we will we'll break now if it's all right with everybody and and take up with take up with three when we get back but let's take this break and stretch our legs thanks