Finding Non-Spiritual Answers to a Spiritual Problem – Sandy B.

This is CCAD 8, Southeastern Conference on Alcohol and Drug Abuse, held November 30th through December 4th, 1983 in Atlanta, Georgia. This is cassette number 24 entitled, There Is a Solution. uh the first time i heard him was on a tape and about a year later i was privileged to hear him in person and i think at least once a year since then i have gotten to hear you now those of you who have never heard him uh maybe i've kind of warned you ahead of time uh but he is super i was talking to him before the meeting and i said you know anything special he says oh well I'm just still sober. And I thought, well, that's a pretty good thing. If he's going to be up here tonight, we're glad he's still sobered. So I'm very happy to give you Sandy Dee from Washington, D.C. Good evening, everybody. my name is Sandy Beach and I'm an alcoholic. How are you today? It is a pleasure to be back here again and to still be sober. I came into Alcoholics Anonymous on Pearl Harbor Day in 1964 and it's almost Pearl Harbor day again so if I can stay sober till Wednesday while I'll catch up to my friend Hal M. and finished 19 years in this wonderful fellowship. And for that, I am extremely grateful. And I generally start my talk by saying that I did come in in 1964 and I haven't been drunk since my first meeting in Manassas, Virginia, and I owe it all to not drinking. And that is exactly the reason that I haven't been drunk, is due to not drinking. I don't think we need to explore that any further. But if you look at the slogans and a lot of the AA literature, it doesn't specifically say, don't drink anywhere. I do not know if you noticed that. We have easy does it and there but for the grace of God and we assume that people will pick up on the not drinking part but a lot of us have ratty little minds when we come in and hell if they don't tell us directly we might coast a while on the theory that no one told me specifically not to do that so I'll be the one in case there's anybody new here tonight to let the cat out of the bag that if you find that you are continuing to get drunk check your drinking I would just see if you don't have a glass in your hand and if it isn't getting in your mouth then you're actually swallowing it because this was one of the great revelations of fellowship is to learn very wise things like drinking gets you drunk and I think I understood that on the intellectual level but I don't think I understood that it applied to me this is what I think happens in the program there's so many of these ideas that suddenly have our name on them and they take a new meaning and this was one of them if you had asked me back in my drinking days why I got drunk I had a lot of reasons and none of them had to do with drinking they had to deal with family problems or they had to do with a boss in the Marine Corps. I had a colonel who was a Gestapo agent in disguise and if you worked for him you'd be drunk too. And getting drunk just happened. I relate to people who come around and say, I was walking down the street and I was taken drunk. That kind of a thing is somebody jumps out of an alley and just pumps booze into you and all of a sudden there you are an innocent victim drunk again. And so obviously the solution to sobriety and to a happy life is getting everybody else to straighten their act out and to stop causing these situations and so it was um i don't know about you but it was very meaningful me for me to discover that there was a middle step in the chain reaction where if somebody does something to upset me and me getting drunk and that was what i had control over and uh it was just simply for the next 10 minutes or so don't drink and then keep doing that for the rest of your life and it's amazing what will happen i believe the program is a very simple program there's just two things and i like to talk to anybody who is new to aa and i have felt this way all along there's two things you have to do you simply don't drank and change everything there is about you those two things um and you will be amazed how your life will turn out just if you could keep that in mind I had a couple things I want to get out of the way before I talk about AA one of them I wanted to make sort of with Conway's permission a humanitarian announcement with this many people in the room I'm going to try one more time to find this person who I've been looking for since 1964 and I try occasionally every couple of years when I get a big convention I figure there may be the whole new crowd and I'm looking for a man I have no idea he's probably close to 50 nowadays and in 1964 you were a lieutenant commander in the United States Navy and you and I were co-patients in the nut ward at Bethesda Naval Hospital right outside of Washington and you'll remember me because I shook real bad I was real skinny and had a crew cut and I was in the entire nut ward the champion ashtray maker in clay class and so I know that if you're here you will remember me because you were the second best ashtay maker and you were quite jealous and what I'm talking about is the instance in late October of 64 when we had a clay off and all the other patients had looked at the two ashtrays and saw that mine was clearly going to be the winner when the psychiatrist came in the next day to judge him and if you recall you casually walked into my room that night smoking a big cigar just casually carrying on a conversation and then you reached over just sort of without thinking and put your cigar out in my ashtray and broke it now I've forgotten the whole incident but I figure anybody who pulled a stunt like that is probably a drunk and with any luck you ended up in the fellowship of Alcoholics Anonymous and if you've been sober this long you might be getting around to the ninth step and you've probably been saying if I could find that guy I could make an amend so I'll be up here after the meeting and maybe it will help your program as I say I get through next Wednesday where I'll finish another year in the program and it's been like all the years of sobriety I really believe they just get better but it's been a challenging year and I'm going to just share a little bit and I hope I can do it and then get on with the talk as the year started I was eagerly looking forward to my fifth wedding anniversary I was very happy I had a nice house and I was confronted with a situation where I was told there was someone else and that the marriage was ending and it was devastating and I sold the house and I moved and started getting my life together and I am sharing with you number one maybe somebody else has these kind of things going on in their lives but I'm mainly sharing it with you because of what the program did as far as I'm concerned within a few days I got a phone call from my good friend Hal M and I'll tell you exactly what he said called me up and he said are you being grateful? Are you counting all the things that you have going for you? And I had to admit that I wasn't. That is not what I was doing at all. And I heard several people talk to me along those lines that this program has the power to keep us in two places at once. This program can enable us to simultaneously go through extreme pain and grief and sadness, which is exactly what was going on, and I don't know of any way to speed that up. I do not know of anyway to tell anyone how you're not going to hurt for the next three months or whatever it's going to take. But what can go on in the program is to simultaneously realize how lucky we are to be held in the arms of our AA friends and our AA group and our loving higher power to just carry us in this pain day by day, right through to where we're supposed to go. It is as if you are both sad and grateful at the same time. Because of people talking, because of maybe watching someone else do the same thing, I just felt at all times that everything was going to be fine. This is the perspective that AA gives us. As I sat listening to Clancy last night, we're talking about what it looks like and what the alcoholic's perspective is and how sensitive we are to having it change. And I've heard him talk before and to use his analogy, it was as if someone walked in that day and took all the technicolor out of the world and everything was suddenly in the grays and black and white. And that's how I saw it. and by having the people around they said no it's still in technicolor you just can't see it that way yet but you will soon it's going to come back brighter than it ever has i remember hal telling me look back on the years of sobriety some of the things that have happened to you getting thrown out of the marine corps and other marriage problems and bankruptcy and all the little interesting things that can come along in sobriery and um look back on each one of those and how in your own story every one of those was a step up every one was a step up I've never really moved forward in this program without some sort of a paradoxical apparent setback left to my own devices I would maintain the same relationship with my higher power I wouldn't try to get any closer you know what I mean and I'd just go, this is pretty comfortable right here. I'm putting in eight, nine seconds a day on the 24-hour day book. You know, I get up and I read that thing, but I'm late for the subway, so I get back and try and finish it that night. And, you know, whatever amount of meditation or prayer that I may have had, as long as things are going real well, that's about where I leave it. And so I mean, it's just sort of a paradoxical situation that in this particular situation, there was no alternative to prayer. I found myself sort of whining the Lord's Prayer on about 20 hours a day, you know, just going on and just going, I don't know what the hell this is doing, but it's the only thing I seem to be able to do. And I tell you what it did was it kept me in those two perspectives I'm telling you about. It kept me realizing how grateful I was to have a higher power, to have you all and to have the absolute knowledge at all times that everything was going to be alright. Remember how that was when you knew and you walk into an AA group and you've got everything going wrong. I mean, you know, the money and the romance and the job and all of that. And then somebody walks over. You haven't even seen this guy before. And he just puts his arm around you, pats you on the shoulder, and he just says, everything's going to be all right. And I don't know how that works. The pressure between the shoulder blades must go down in the soul and back up to the brain, and we just go, good. God, that's good news. because if you had asked me from my vantage point I would tell you it is never going to be all right and I just I can remember sitting there in probably the month of May and I said and I don't think I can take this for the next 50 years did you ever project a head when you're a little bit uncomfortable and you sit there and you just go I don' t know as I mathematically look towards through the 90's of feeling like this I may get drunk around 1992 I mean there's this because about then all my willpower will cave in and my I know they say no one ever died of lack of sleep but I may prove them wrong you know this type of a thing and so the time went on and the healing power of this program set in whatever her adjustments are made inside or made and then the technicolor started coming back sitting at my home group everybody was funny again uh sitting in my home group i just felt so interested in other people's problems again i was able to go over and start talking to the new people and uh the the birds were coming out again the sky finally got blue again and all of the joy of the program came in and it seemed stronger than it had ever been. And then I was so lucky to meet somebody else. And all those nice feelings are back and I know they're mutual and life is going on and it's so different. When I look back, I thought I'd probably start crying. I'm glad I didn't. When I looked back, I go, where would I have been without you? Without AA? What would I have done? I probably would have We've tried to fight it, which is our traditional way of solving problems. Let's attack it. Let's go, I'm going to will my way to something. I don't know how you will your way on any of those things. All we did here was just collapse. Surrender. Our wonderful first step. You're going to turn it over. If you trust all of the things that we've been taught in AA, we just sort of lay down and do the best you can saying whatever prayers you can and then watch what happens. I want to thank everybody. I'm just so glad to get that part out and now I can talk about something that I had on my mind and that was I always like to think of some subject otherwise I just hear my same talk every time and it's boring. It's a terrible talk I can give it to you in a thumbnail sketch. I drank a lot and then I came to AA and got sober And so that's basically my drinking story. And a lot of people's stories can be condensed down to that. Drank a lot, came to AA, got sober. If you came to AAA and didn't get sober, you don't get to talk. So... You never hear that story. One of the advantages of staying sober, you get to walk. You get to have a good talk. But I got thinking about... If I were to talk about what I want to talk about is the problem with God. That's what I would like to talk About. I mean, this is what I see as the problem with God because, you know, AA is a spiritual program and we hem and haw around the bush about it being a spiritual Program. We talk about higher power and I said higher power for seven years and then I got on an efficiency kick and i said i'll shortcut that and i shifted to god and i've been using that particular word since the seventh year and um you can use whatever word you want but i think we all know what we're talking about we're talking about something bigger than ourselves that either exists or doesn't it either applies to us or it doesn't and there's a lot of other people keep talking about it and even if you don't want to deal with it they keep bothering you and it keeps coming up places and they keep building churches and putting bibles in hotel rooms and everywhere you go I go, oh, that subject, it's around again. And ever since you're little, you're either going to deal with that or not. And you can postpone dealing with it. You can pretend you've dealt with it and you can do whatever you want. But every human being seems to have to confront this issue. I don't know anybody who can totally block it out of their mind. They can try not thinking about it, but eventually it creeps back in. It was even creeping in in my drinking years. You know, this idea, well I wonder what's all that stuff that folks are talking about I don't see where it's doing any good it seems to start more wars than anything else you know religions and all the various ideas and we have a chapter in our big book called The Chapters of the Agnostic R.O. referred to that I think when he was talking about it and reading out of chapter 5 and for many years in the early years when I was in Alcoholics Anonymous is I was not a big reader of anything because I knew stuff without reading it. I don't know if you... You just know ahead of time what's going to be in the chapter, so why actually read it? And I was aware of the chapter called To the Agnostic or We Agnostics and I knew without reading that that was where it explained in AA how you stayed sober if you were an agnostic now if you're new and you think that too then let me tell you what it says and then we can maybe proceed from there I can shortcut the whole chapter I guess it's around Hal would know ten pages or something like that what the chapter says is if I were to get it down to three or four words is change your mind that's what the chapter says oh are you an agnostic change your mind and that sounds like a rather weak course of action just change it what about evidence what about well you remember when we changed our mind about being an alcoholic one day we weren't the next day we were we had no new evidence we had nothing we just said okay I'm an alcoholic you know what I mean each one of us I don't know you're sitting in a meeting and you say oh I'm tired of being the non-alcoholic you know the weight of the world would be another guy from your class showed up in AA well my god class of 53 well if he can do it then I thought well alright and then you just change your mind well there you were he said alright I'll admit it I'm not an alcoholic and then look what happened the doors that opened and the things that that made available to you and me and everybody who's done that are immeasurable what came into our lives by one little changing of the mind there just going alright I give up I'm finally going to stop denying it whatever it took the pain one more detox whatever it was but what had happened there was I changed my mind Change of mind that I'm an alcoholic, but I don't need AA. I'll tell you that. I may be an alcoholic. I don'T need all these damn meetings. I can tell you That. So I didn't go to all those meetings. And then I was not very happy. And there came a time when, All right, I'll go to those meetings, Not getting a sponsor. I'll Tell You That. I'm always drawing the line. You know, when we change our mind, We change it in very little degrees. This very minor will move one quarter of an inch forward In the direction with these fanatics. And I don't want to get in the whole mess of that whole thing, you know. The next thing they'll have me doing is the steps. And I'm, you Know, I like the crowd that was saying put the plug in the jug. That sounded enough. Why complicate it beyond that? Keep it simple. That's what Dr. Bob said, right? Put the plug and the jug and that's it. And there you sit. the plug is in the jug and you've got a 45 up to your temple you know life is still miserable and we don't have alcohol to fix it and we're sitting there and so we change our mind again on some minor point and get a sponsor now that's a bad thing to do because that gets us to change our minds about a lot of other things because we've let a guy or gal into our lives who takes our inventory for us and finds many, many other areas that need to be changed. Almost all of our ideas need to being inventoried and many of them need to been changed and of course all of them are moving us and see this is the problem with God. All of them whether we know it or not and I think we know are moving as closer to a decision about God. That's the problem with doing any of this stuff. You get a sponsor you know and he believes in a higher power talks about it if I hang around this guy, eventually that topic is going to come up. And I'm going to have to deal with it in my life, you know. And I believe my group has a higher power and so on down. But we see beyond that, eventually I'm gonna have to think about this for me. And I am reminded of some of these choices that we get to make are laughable now. but when we're making them they are difficult because of the perspective we have at the time and I'm reminded of the great line in the Jack Benny radio show from many, many years ago when all you hear is the sound of footsteps Benny's footsteps walking down a hallway maybe some of you remember this it's just click, click,click and then a voice your money or your life followed by silence and more silence as Benny is thinking about it. And finally the stick-up man says, Well? And Benny says, I'm thinking! I'm thinkin'! And he was confronted with a terrible choice. And I love the story of the alcoholic who's up in front of the judge and the judge says, Young man, you've been here ten times this year for being drunk and public I'm going to have to really come down hard on you now but I'm gonna give you a choice one AA meeting or a year in jail same thing the guys out there just going one AA meeting or a years or a year in jail that's a tough thing uh what jail um what jail oh why am I always up against this kind of conflict one AA meeting or a year in jail. Because we know somehow what one AA meeting might mean. It's longer than a year and jail. It goes on and on. You remember, you know, you hang around the bar and you're drinking with guys and one of them joins AA. And you never see him again. You know what I mean? Never, never comes back. Guys go to jail, they come back. but AA is forever they just go away we never see them so there's something very intimidating about one AA meeting and then we come in the chapter of the agnostic is an interesting little choice we take away our first step treatment centers all the education we're having about alcoholism suddenly confronts us with the severity of this illness and the hopelessness and what being powerless really is. What it means to be powerless over alcohol. I sometimes like to use the analogy of taking somebody on top of a 70-story building over here, the plaza, and pitching them off. And as the sidewalk is coming up about 8 feet from the sidewalk, if we could have a big hand come out of the sky, this is AA's first step. And it grabs him just before the sidewalk hits and says, Excuse me, sir, we're conducting a survey do you believe in God and this you see is the wrong time to ask that question it would be much better to ask it at the bar when we can all give our intellectual dissertations on the existence or non-existence but what we have with a fatal illness with the sidewalk hurtling up we don't really have anything about creating the existence of a higher power but there's sure the need for one or else and I think that's what happens when the recognition of our illness sets in it's like somebody pulls the rug out from under us and we're firmly planted in mid-air and all of our self-centeredness there is no other plan and in the chapter of the agnostic there is this little choice and Bill wrote to die an alcoholic death or to live by spiritual principles is sometimes a difficult choice and I again I just relate to that and I go you know you come to the here's a crossroad in your sobriety and all of a sudden you go yeah you know if I go this way I'm gonna die an alcoholic death and now you already know what an alcoholic life was like vomiting and all that yeah that must be bad they call it an alcoholic death and we've heard a few horror stories of somebody drank a few decades longer than we did and god do they look awful and they tell some rather scary things and even though we say no it'll never happen to me we're starting to get that squirmy uneasiness that if we went back it might well happen and yet there's this term that is suddenly thrown at us you can either have that or choice b live by spiritual principles spiritual principles that sounds well how bad is an alcoholic death let's uh let's pursue that one a little further um aren't there drugs or something that you could ease the pain i mean you know and uh does medicare got something that what's choice three so we run out and buy every damn pop book that they got in drug fair celery and beyond you know rock and roll and yoga alright that'll do it but no we're left with then this is our dilemma at least it was mine probably is on a daily basis my own way or some other way I've got all these plans for myself I have so much insight into things versus a spiritual way of whatever that may mean to each one of us whatever that means in terms of this program and I feel that as an alcoholic I have the advantage often when you know I hear people talk about I'm grateful that I'm an alcoholic it's bad enough to be grateful that you're in AA but if you're new and you hear the speaker up there saying and I'm also grateful oh, but I'm an alcoholic. You go, God, that's going too far. That just makes me vomit to think that somebody would stand up there and say, well, the reason that I think some of us say it is the illness of alcoholism took away the choice we would have taken had we not been an alcoholic where they said you're either going to live by spiritual principles or be mildly neurotic. You know what I mean? You could just sort of mediocre your way all the way to senility. and there was no reason compelling reason to ever get into this other thing called character building or whatever goes on in this AA way of life where you have sponsors and they're suggesting things and they are moving you towards what I refer to as the main stream of life boring, boring, boring main stream of life you know the main highway the main road there's no massage parlors on the main row there's a boring, boring people they get up in the morning Click, click, click. Hey, I'm going to work. And they go directly to work their job. They stay there all day. Work, work, work. And then they get in their car and they come home to their home, their own home. And they stay there with their family and they'd be a nice father. Hello, little Johnny Dog. And they put the people to bed every day. Vroom, vroom, voom, vrooom. And, you know, the program is going, if you really get with it, you can be like that. Hey. Come on. Why would I want to be like that? That's exactly the opposite of the way I want to be. That's what just a dumb guy with no resources he's condemned to living that way. I got more and I want get more out of life than that. Well, you know when you get a sponsor and they're just going, you are you're getting nut wards, jails police DTs convulsions. You're getting all the goodies. you don't have the resources to go to work every day and come home you couldn't come close you have no idea why that is so joyful you have not you have got no idea why that's such a marvelous way to live and such a creative way to life you've never done it and I can say I can tell without doing it it wouldn't be any fun I can tel without doing i I can tel you know that marvelous contempt prior to investigation one of the stories in our big book I don't have to try that I can tell without doing it it isn't any good you ever had that feeling about AA you looked into one smoky basement you said what go there every night and you're going to be happy wrong you didn't have to physically do it and that's what the program gets us to do change your mind change your brain change your body change your heart change your head and so what I'm grateful about is with the fatal illness I often look at my alcoholism as like some guy with a .45 caliber pistol about two feet behind me. And he's just there in case I change my mind about staying in AA. And I'm sitting there and I'm just going, you know, this doesn't make sense anymore. I think I'll just take a walk. And all of a sudden I hear click and it's that hammer cocking back there and it is my fatal illness. And all the sudden everything makes sense again. You know what I am talking about? I go, hey, I just had another spiritual awakening I see the world clearly again I see why these meetings are so exciting oh yes what a wonderful thing and so we are driven by two things we're driven by the fatal illness and we're given by the attraction and the rewards we get from the trying I'm reminded of a bird flying along over the rocks and if you don't keep flapping you're going to crash into the rocks and so initially we're flapping like mad in our fledgling sobriety just to avoid crashing but the longer we flap the higher we get and the higher up we get the better the view is and we keep working at it and we're looking around and we've got a perspective we never dreamed we'd have because we never thought we could flap that long or would we were quitters we never hung in with anything and it's almost by default that we were forced to find the resources within ourselves to get to places we never would have gone and so we're either going to flap like mad to stay up there with a good perspective or we're going to find ourselves flapping like hell to avoid hitting the rocks uh we have no choices was that flapping oh so anyway this program and all of the forces in it all of these senior members who sit around watching us with their evil eyes making sure we're moving in the right direction saying the right things are pushing us closer to a personal decision about a higher power that to me is the inevitable task of every human being whether in the program or not. The subject just doesn't go away. I personally think that there was something born inside of me that is just there. And a lot of my problems and anxiety were caused by trying to find non-spiritual answers to a spiritual problem. I thought alcohol was the answer to that particular spiritual problem If I am a mental, physical, and spiritual human being I've got to grow in all areas or I feel funny I feel torn I'm not a balanced person I've moved along in these two dimensions but I've left out the third one and so when you're into advanced denial you go well I don't have that dimension and everyone says it's obvious and we try to find some other way of addressing the pain that is caused by not growing in that area and Bhakta worked very well for me vodka was a higher power I had great faith in vodka it worked from the inside out just like a spiritual program does it made me feel better without changing the circumstances it was something I had good faith in even after I got sober I don't know if any of you have done this you're sober three months no liquor in the house but you've got a $50 bill hidden in your wallet just in case the program doesn't work you know what I mean you gotta cover yourself right I mean what if the whole thing falls apart and then that'll take us back and then, you know, we just have this mild reservation. So I just have this feeling we just get nudged along towards this decision and they are always difficult. And I suppose the final decision which has to do with making a decision turn our life over, that whole premise, the whole idea of attempting to become the best possible person that I can become those kinds of targets when we talk about a spiritual way of life there's no middle ground there's no way of partially giving up drinking there's no way to partially you know you can't ask the higher powers help to be semi honest dear God help me to be honest most of the time he says do that on your own you know that's sort of your own way and so I you know I go I'm not sure I want to be that good a person did you ever start thinking about the implications of our steps and they're taking us too far you know here we are worried about becoming too good and my mother's going i wish you'd straighten out you know there's that kind of a strange perspective on things and i remember going through things like well i don't think i'd better work this program too hard for my neighborhood sake if you know what i mean in other words a guy that good would stand out in the neighborhood and then they would be uncomfortable by having someone of that magnitude so for their sake i'll remain an asshole you know Well, I move ahead. You know, you've got to think of other people. It's amazing what our little minds will do to help us not get into making the decision or problem with a higher power. The problem with the higher power is it's perfect. That's the problem with it. The only kind of help that seems to be available is perfect help. Do you really want to become good? You know. Well, i'm not sure. What does that entail? I mean, you know, it doesn't look like there could be fun there. You know, images of priests and nuns and monasteries come into my mind. I'm not sure I want that much help. I enjoy certain things that they don't do and I'm worried that God would call down and go, that's it, oh come on, why did I take that step? There's a great reluctance to move ahead and this is the kind of dilemma that a spiritual program presents and whether we want to avoid it or not it's there and I think we look at it every day and we look back over the years we're in and if you can there's no way to measure whether you've done any better than anybody else but have you done better than you did last year have you been better than the year before and I don't know and I'm thinking if we don't see progress then we're endanger if we can't see some growth then we must be dying because there's no way to stay just the same there's nowhere to be in the middle of this environment this kind of activity this much interacting with each other and stay the same we're going to be moving and move along to the I always like to use this little example and then I'll close of the little boy I think I told this here a few years ago the little boy with a toothache So it's my favorite analogy of the problem with a higher power. And this little kid, well, I had a baseball game the next morning and he had to get up bright and early. He wanted to get a good night's sleep and he woke up at about 1 a.m. with a toothache and it started twingling away back there. So like the rest of us, he said, well, the first thing we're going to do about this is hope it goes away. This is a normal way that I do whenever I get a bill I didn't expect. I got to put it down and go, maybe it'll go away. I still fantasize that problems can be solved that way. If you don't address them, maybe they'll just go away. And I'm going to say, no, it's there. Thirty minutes later he starts wrestling with the issue at hand and that is, is he going to wake his mother up and get some aspirin or not? And so he wrestles with the decision. He says, you know, if I get her in here she'll give me the aspirin, it'll take care of this little pain and I'll go to sleep and that'll be it. But he doesn't call her because he's still wrestling with the magnitude of the problem. That's not the problem at all. and he waits two hours loses two more hours sleep before he calls up out and she naturally comes running in yes, yes, I'm a toothache oh, I'll get you some aspirin he gets him boom, he's back to sleep and the question is why did he wait two hours before he called her to come in and take care of his problem and of course the answer was that he knew his mother and he knew that she wasn't going to stop with the aspirin he knew that the next morning she was going to get on the phone and call the dentist and he was going to make an appointment with the dentist and then they were going to go into the dentist and the dentist was a nosy guy also and he wasn't going to settle with just that tooth he was gonna say hey while we're here let's have a full checkup and then there was a nurse in there and they were gonna check a condition of every tooth in the mouth and they would mark down if there's cavities or not and then set up a series of appointments until they put the mouth in perfect condition and all he wanted was a cup of aspirin he didn't want to get the mouth in perfect condition we'll do that later all I want but his problem was the source of help only came as a full package and so I would tell anybody who knew who's wrestling with this you either buy the whole deal or you do it yourself and this is the way I feel about AA take the whole package as soon as you can just cave in to the whole idea become a full member in the fullest sense of your AA group get right in the middle not in the fringes you can't fall off the middle you know what I'm talking about because somebody's going to see you going hey, hey, hay, hay and as a group we just move this way don't stay on the edges get in the middles get active in there It is the action that does the work. The action of going on 12-7, being part of the group, of making the coffee, of being the secretary, of handing out the chips, whatever it is, it is theaction that causes us to eventually get our feelings to move along. A day well lived. Let me close with a day well live. What does a daywell lived do? We talk about a day at a time and the power of a day and I was thinking about why a day is so powerful because we sit and I don't know about you all but I sit and my mind vacillates between the past and now and the future you know what I mean and I look back in the past and when we first come into a all we can see are an endless series of days that we screwed up and we have guilt and remorse and oh god I hate looking back there and then we look at today and we're doing a very good job here so we look at all the rest of eternity and we see ourselves just being the same damn jerk the same result the same whole thing there is no comfortable place in time for our brain to think on and then we get with a program we get with a sponsor we get following directions we get our literature and we just plug away doing the best we can for a whole day at the end of that day we start inventory and we look back and we go you know I did pretty good we surprised ourselves and we got that's just wonderful how well I did today I made a little screw up but I ran back and apologized and I had a little situation over here and I fixed it. You know, I did good here and I met with this person and normally I get upset and I handle that. Not bad. And then in order to look back on the past we have to go through that day to get there. And it changes the whole color of the past. The past is still filled with all kinds of screw-ups except for the most recent past. And it's not bad. So our feeling about the past haunting us, loses 90% of its power just by one day well lived. And then we start looking off into the future and we go, wow, what's my future going to be like? It's going to be an endless series of days like today. We go, God, that's not a bad future at all. That's a hell of a good future to look forward to. And that whole fear of the future is diluted by 90% by just one day well lived and the same thing happens with one day not well lived the past gets really crummy again and the future looks awful again so we have a program of a day at a time and we have a God a higher power this is a power tool program those 12 steps are power tools we don't work them alone we plug in and then we're able to do them and if you if I say anything to anybody who is new I would tell you what a marvelous thing it is to be in the today. And you just can't stay there alone. You cannot just will yourself to stay in the today. What you can ask for is help to stay in today. You can ask for a higher power to keep you there. In your group, in your AA program, your 24-hour day book, the AA literature, those all provide the resources to stay there. And we just urge you, stay in the middle. Stay right in the middle of this group and maybe we'll all be here next year. God bless you all. Thank you.