It Isn’t the Direction of Change That Terrifies an Alcoholic — It’s the Fact of Change – Phil P.

Hi, my name is Phil Petty, and I'm an alcoholic. Hi, Phil. Can you hear me all right and back? Good. I wouldn't want you to miss a word of this. It's not much, but it's the best I can do. I understand this meeting is being tape recorded? Okay. I'd like to say a few words for those who will hear the tape but do not have the pleasure of being with us tonight. This was recorded on the 19th of February at the Sacramento Spring Fling. The Saturday night banquet meeting being held in the Arco Arena. Seating capacity is 17,000, and the place is packed. I mean, what do they know? I have some people here in the audience who have known me for some time, and that always creates a situation where you have mixed emotions about speaking. You know what mixed emotions are. That's the feeling you get when your teenage daughter comes in at 4 a.m. reading a Gideon Bible. I should caution you that I only speak for about 45 minutes, and so if you get nothing out of this at all but you've got something doing by 8.30 or so, you ought to be there. My sponsor once told me that I would be relatively popular as an AA speaker, and I was really flattered until he told me why. He said, you're too dumb to be controversial and too lazy to run overtime. It is one of the tragedies of my career that I have proved him to be correct. Speaking of... Speaking of sponsors, please don't respond to this if your sponsor is here tonight. But do you have the feeling on occasion that your sponsor is not quite right? I mean, I have had two sponsors in the entire time I have been sober. I had one, and I kept him for as long as he could, and then he passed away. And I thought, this time I'll pick one that's a lot smarter and a lot more on the ball. And I picked another one, and he turned out to be the same. No change at all. So when I talk about sponsors, I might as well say it in the singular. I'm talking about sponsor. My sponsor never treats me with the dignity that I think I'm entitled to. You know, it's like my AA birthday is April 23rd. On April 23rd, I get a phone call, and my sponsor will say, is this your birthday? And I'll say yes. And he'll say, how long have you been sober? And last year I said 31 years. And he said, that's a nice start. And I hung up. I love the story about the relative newcomer who was working the steps, got to step four and wrote it out under great anguish and great pain and went into great detail, and he was so pleased with it at the end, he sent it over to his sponsor to look at it. And his sponsor called him and said, that's a wonderful fourth step. Who wrote it? And the kid said, I'm glad you liked it. Who read it to you? I promise you I won't be over time. There's a story they tell in Long Beach about a meeting where they had to be finished, on time, so that the janitors could come in and clean up. And they had a speaker on one particular occasion. It was a little more windy than usual. And they warned him that they had a very strict time limit. And about five minutes before he was supposed to finish, the leader sent him a little note saying, you know, please finish on time. And the time came for him to be done, and he was going full blast. And the leader looked at his watch very pointedly, and the guy just kept going. And after about five more minutes, the leader stood up, and the guy kept going. And finally, the leader got so mad, he picked up the gavel and threw it at him, and unfortunately missed him and hit an old-timer sitting in the front row. And as he was sliding out of his seat, the old-timer said, hit me again. I can still hear him. In the course of your drinking career, did you have somebody in your family that you just walked all over in your drinking, who secretly believed that you didn't really need to come to Alcoholics Anonymous? I mean, my mother was like that. I came out here. I came to Alcoholics Anonymous. I got married very quickly. My mother was absolutely convinced that what had happened was I came to California. I found a nice girl. I settled down, and that was all I needed. She would come to AA meetings with us when she came out to visit, and she loved you. But I don't think she really believed that I belonged until after about five years of sobriety. I took her to a meeting. I was the speaker, and she heard my story for the first time. And when I got finished speaking, her first words were, thank God for Alcoholics Anonymous. And there's always somebody, you know, who will ask you, you go back for a family reunion or something, and they'll get off to the side and say, do you still have to go to all those meetings? I used to try to explain it to them, you know. I might just as well try to explain it to the light fixture. I mean, how can you tell? How can you tell somebody that you have grown infinitely more addicted to the love and the understanding that you find here than you ever did to the stuff that brought you here? So now when they ask me that, I just say, yeah, I'm a tough case. They haven't cured me yet. And I keep going. Did you ever take a non-alcoholic to an AA meeting? If you're relatively new and you haven't done it, I recommend that you do. Pick somebody who has seen the AA program work in your life. Somebody like your employer. Or one of your employees. Or your clergyman. Or your doctor. And you ask them about a month ahead of time, and they will be enthused about going. Because they want to support you. And you go pick them up on the night of the meeting, and you notice there has been a slight change in attitude. It is as if they have heard on the 6 o'clock news that we now believe the disease is contagious after all. But they will come, and they'll slink into the back of the room. And, you know, they'll have faces like clenched fists. And by the time the meeting is half over and you and I are engaged in our usual tomfoolery, they're laughing aloud at what they've seen here. And by the time the meeting is over, they are euphoric at what they have found here. And on the way home, they always say exactly the same thing. Aren't they a happy, well-adjusted group of people? We know better. I think what they see is not that you and I are individuals, individually that well-adjusted at all, but rather that our neuroses are complementary. It is as if to say the rocks in your head fit the holes in mine. But, you know, they see something very fundamental in AA that I don't want to forget, even though they may put the wrong label on it, and that is the fact that you and I, together with a cement of the AA program binding us, are better able to go out there and do well than any other group of people I have ever seen. We've put two million people. We've put two million people out on the streets in the last 58 years, and we're not even slowing up. You know, I'm delighted that people react that way. And if we're not all that well-adjusted individually, collectively, we've got every reason to be a little proud of ourselves. And I think we should be. Another thing I like to do when I'm traveling is go to meetings outside my home area. If you haven't done that, if you're relatively new, I strongly urge you to give it a try. I went to a meeting. I went to a meeting three or four years ago in northern New Mexico, and we were vacationing there, and I wanted to go to a Thursday night meeting, and there was one in the directory, 8 o'clock, and I went in, and there were about 25 people there, and they don't have an opening prayer, and they don't read Chapter 5, and they don't have a secretary's announcements. They don't read the traditions, and they don't have a closing prayer. What happens is, at 8 o'clock, somebody gets up and says, I'm the leader, and you start. And we go around the room, and when everybody's finished, they leave. And you know, the funny part of it is, there are people in that room who are 15 and 20 years sober who don't have the faintest idea they're doing it all wrong. One other random thought before we get going here. Don't you love the language of the big book? This book is meant to be suggestive only. Here are the steps we took which are suggested as a program of recovery. If you'd be new to the program of Alcoholics Anonymous, let me also point out that the California Penal Code is suggestive only. It does not say you can't do all of the things it describes. It simply spells out in agonizing detail what will happen to you if you do. And I suggest you take the program with about that same degree of seriousness. I was a common garden variety drunk. I was the oldest of three children. Grew up in a small Midwestern town. And my dad early on said, get good grades. And so I got good grades because school work came easy to me. I had a younger brother, and he had a little more trouble with that. So my dad spent a little more time with him. And I resented the time my father spent with my brother and not with me. My dad said, become athletes. And athletics were always fun for me, and I went out and I made the teams. My brother didn't, and so he spent a little more time encouraging him along. And I resented the fact that he was spending that extra time with my brother. By the time I was a senior in high school, I was doing very well in grades and very well on the athletic teams. And I was very tense around people. I couldn't talk easily to people. I was bound up. I resented a lot of my life at that point. And when I was 18 years old, two of the most unusual happenings of my life occurred. One was I got my first job in radio and television. And the other was I started to drink. And I found that on about three glasses of beer, I could actually talk to you. And wonder of wonders, you talked back. And I became a social animal for the first time in my life, and I loved it. I also found out that I have a tendency to be thick-tongued when drinking. So I never drank until I was finished working for the day. I would stay sober while I went through whatever I was going through. Radio or television. But as soon as I was done for the day, I went out and I drank. I did not drink to get pleasantly high. I did not drink to relax. I drank to get drunk. And do things that I was too inhibited to do sober. And blame it on the alcohol the next day. That was the pattern of my drinking until about two years before I got to you. And then the pattern, through no fault of my own, changed. And I became a periodic. I would stay sober for weeks. Sometimes months at a time. But when I started to drink, I would drink around the clock until I literally couldn't hold it down anymore. Somewhere in the neighborhood of ten days to two weeks in there. And I would always begin the same way. I would lay in a supply of vodka. Lie down on the bed. Get a newspaper. I've always been a compulsive reader. And I would read and drink and pass out. And I would come to six or eight hours later. And you can't just load up and go. It takes a little while. So I would drink and read. Usually the same article on the same page of the same newspaper. And it would still be news to me. And I would drink and pass out. And that is essentially the kind of pattern that I brought to you when I came to Alcoholics Anonymous. Now I knew a lot about you. I had seen the Days of Wine and Roses when it was a television show on Playhouse 90 twice. And in that particular Playhouse 90 production, the people in the Alcoholics Anonymous meeting all looked like alcoholics. And that's exactly what I thought all of you were going to look like. And I'll never forget walking into my first AA meeting, looking around the room and making that wonderfully fundamental discovery that every newcomer makes when he finds out that the recovering alcoholics in our society are cleverly disguised to look like ordinary human beings. And I was greatly relieved. I was also rather paranoid about my anonymity. Did you particularly care? You know, I really didn't want anybody to know that I was coming to Alcoholics Anonymous. My sponsor tried to reassure me. He told me that Alcoholics Anonymous was every bit as embarrassed about it as I was. They didn't plan any press conferences. I came to my first meeting when I was only 18. I was only three days in Southern California. And the only person in the Los Angeles basin who knew me sent me to the meeting. I don't know how you would have broken my anonymity. One of the ways I thought you might... I thought you were going to look like alcoholics and I would run into one or more of you, God forbid, on the streets of Long Beach. And you would speak to me. And then everybody would put two and two together and say, What's that nice looking young fellow doing talking to that old drunk? Obviously they belong to Alcoholics Anonymous. And you know, I started keeping a little survey after that first meeting realizing you didn't all look the part. And I've now been sober for some time. And I've been to some international and national and state and local conventions. And I've been to meetings on three continents and assorted islands. And I would guess over the years that I've seen upwards of a quarter of a million recovering alcoholics. And in my survey, which includes tonight's meeting, I'm happy to report to you. That I have seen fewer than ten people in AA meetings who look like alcoholics. Every one of whom turned out to be a member of Al-Anon. There is a good reason for that if you think about it. Do you ever make book on the new couple walking in? Which one is the drunk? I'm always wrong. I keep forgetting if you drank like I did. I mean, I was anesthetized for a good part of my life. And the poor non-alcoholic partner has had to live through every rotten night. I mean, they are bound to accumulate mileage along the way. Luckily, when they get into Al-Anon, they get younger looking a lot quicker than we do. And it all balances out and everything goes well. I should digress for a moment and mention something else. My sponsor, you remember him, also told me to get into no entangling emotional alliances for at least a year after I was sober. And I got married within two months of the time of my AA birthday. I've now been sober 31 years and 10 months. And I've been married 31 years and 8. The applause should be directed to my wife, Joan, who had every bit as much heat from her Al-Anon group as I got from my AA group for doing it. But in any event, I was talking about Al-Anons here briefly. I would like to mention a couple of other things in the interest of greater AA Al-Anon harmony. To those Al-Anons here tonight, male and female, your drinking habits are every bit as peculiar to me as mine ever were to you. I mean, have you ever seen an Al-Anon drink? My wife is currently quaffing it down at the rate of about a fifth every five years. On the very rare occasion when she orders a drink in public, it usually comes in day-glow colors with an umbrella in it. If you give her two of those little plastic drinks they give you on an airplane, it would take her all the way to Hong Kong, and she'd have something left in the second glass. Let me say something seriously. I am a great believer in the Al-Anon program, and you have enriched my life. And I am deeply grateful to you. The Al-Anon with whom I am most closely associated, my wife, is probably as much and more responsible for my sobriety as anybody else I have ever met. She is occasionally infuriating, sometimes silly, and I would be absolutely lost without her. My wife Joan. So I started coming to meetings. I was in wonderful condition. At my meeting, when I came back to the program, I was wearing my wardrobe. I had four cents in cash, almost a full package of cigarettes, and a $150 car that wouldn't run. And I lived in a recovery house on credit for two months, because I had no place to go. I was unemployed and unemployable. And finally I got a job, working in a department store, selling T-shirts and sweat socks. It wasn't much of a job, but then again, I wasn't much of an employee. And I got enough money to move out and get my own place, and things started to get good for me. And a lady in Al-Anon who knew me, and knew that I didn't really like retailing, stopped me one day. I'd been around for about a year, and told me about her company, which was a very large company, and said that they were hiring virtually anybody who came in the doors. I didn't realize what a slam that was until I thought about it. And I discovered something else about me when I got that news. I have no sense of perspective of my own life. Virtually every good thing that has happened to me since I got sober, by the grace of God, has come about because of God and through you. And every time there has been a change for the better, it has initially looked to me like an earthquake. I always think it's going to be terrible. Largely because I am a creature of habit. And even bad habits become comfortable after a while. And if there is any change in my habit pattern, I get anxious. If I won the lottery tonight, or went bankrupt, I would have exactly the same amount of anxiety. It isn't the direction of change, it is the fact of change that causes me to feel that way. So, the lady tells me there is a better job in the mill. Do I, like a normal person, say this is a good deal, I'll go out and try for it? Not me. I had to think about all the negative parts. What happens if I go out there and I get the new job, and I quit the old one that I hate that I can do, and I don't survive the probationary period? I'll starve to death. But when the pain of inactivity became a habit, when inactivity became too great, I went out and I applied, and she was right, they were hiring everybody that came in, and I got on. And it turned out to be one of the best things that ever happened to me. I had already been in the Navy, so I knew how to look busy without really doing anything, which is a tremendous advantage in any multinational corporation. And I liked it so well I stayed there for seven years. When I was about three years sober, another unusual thing happened. A friend of mine who worked for the same company was the public address announcer for the Los Angeles Dodgers, the then Los Angeles Angels, who were to become the California Angels the next year. And he wanted somebody to help out and do some of the games. He was tired of doing them all. And so he invited three of us to come out and audition. He knew I had a background in radio and television. And the other two, I'm sure, being normal, thought this is a good deal, we'll go out and try. Not me. I thought it was a no-win situation. The minute they find out I belong to Alcoholics Anonymous, it's all over. But when the pain of inactivity became too great, I went out and I auditioned, and they offered me the job. One of the reasons I have always felt very close to the California Angels is the fact that they were the first employer I ever had that I told I belonged to Alcoholics Anonymous. And their reaction, I thought, was very typical. It was, so what? One guy in the front office did say, does this mean you won't show up very often? I said, no, it means that I will. And I think in the 27 years I worked for them, I was the only part-time employee they had who never missed a day when he was supposed to be there. And I did the same for the Los Angeles Dodgers, and I worked several years for the Los Angeles Rams. And I sort of retired about two years ago. I got tired of going to ball games all the time. So now the only public address announcing I do is I do the Disneyland Classic, which is a college game at Anaheim Stadium in August, and I do the Freedom Bowl during the holiday season. But I enjoyed it. It was great fun, and it was very entertaining. And I got to know a lot of guys in the press box. And at the time I first started with the ball clubs in 1965, I believe I was the only person in the press box who belonged to Alcoholics Anonymous. I am happy to report that in the years that have passed, you have done a wonderful recruiting job. We can hold a meeting before any game of the season. And if you follow the sports pages at all, you already know that as far as what's going on down on the field is concerned, it is only a matter of time before we take over. At about that same time, I had an opportunity to go back to school. I had gone to college out of high school because the alternative at that time was being drafted into the infantry. And it's amazing how quickly you can make decisions when those are the options for you. But I'd always wanted to go to law school. Now at three years sober, I had the opportunity. There was the schooling available. I had the money to go. I had the support of my wife and my sponsor and my friends. I had every reason to feel good about trying. Not me. I thought it was a no-win situation. If I flunk out, everybody will think I'm dumb. My home group, by the way, is exactly like yours. It is, and I should give them some credit here, the internationally famous Living Sober Wednesday Night participation meeting in Newport Beach, California. And we haven't laughed at anybody in 30 years. We'll laugh with you if you say something funny. We don't even know what you're doing unless you share it with us. Half the people I know in my home group, I haven't the faintest idea of what they do for a living or even what their last names are. And I love them dearly. But I had nothing to worry about, and I didn't realize it. And finally, when the pain became too great, I enrolled. And my sponsor gave me probably the best advice he has ever given me. He said, Why don't you go to school the way you have learned to live? One day at a time. Don't worry about the end of the semester or the end of the curriculum. Just go with today's lesson today. And I did. And much to the shock of my sponsor and my wife and my friends, I graduated. And I did rather well. I don't think it's any mistake, and I don't think it's any coincidence, that out of the first three drunks who sobered up in Alcoholics Anonymous, two had been to law school. I got out of law school. I had qualified for the California bar exam. A normal person, I'm sure, would have thought, Hey, this is a good deal. Look at me. I've qualified to take the bar. Not me. I thought it was a terrible choice. If I went up there and failed, everybody would say, He's wasted all those years in school. If I went up there and passed, everybody would watch while I went out and starved to death. When the pain of inactivity became too great, I went up there and I took the exam and I passed. And in those days, there were only about 40% of the number of lawyers there are now, and nobody was starving to death, and things got very good for me to a degree, economically, that they had never been before. And that caused some anxiety. But luckily, by that time, my sponsor had inculcated into me the basic premise that when your life changes, you turn into the program, not away. That any change in your life that creates any change in your thinking should cause you to go to more meetings, listen more carefully, read the book and the other materials again and again, and stay close. That the only thing you can do wrong when something is going awry, in your life, is to assume that you are different. You're not. We are as alike as two peas in a pod. We come from all kinds of backgrounds, all kinds of social, economic, spiritual, and other backgrounds and environments. And the funny thing is, once we develop the symptoms of alcoholism, we are as much alike as any two people in the world. Have you ever tried or had to explain to another drunk what it means to be totally and completely drunk? And completely alone? We've all been there. We could be in the coliseum with a hundred thousand people who knew us from birth, and we'd still be alone. Have you ever had to explain to another alcoholic what it's like to be in complete and total despair? I'll never forget, I used to do institutional work, and one guy out at the state prison at Chino described it as well as anybody I'd ever heard. He said it's the kind of attitude that you would have to cheer up from in order to commit suicide. I practiced law for some years, and things got good for me, and I enjoyed it. And an opportunity came along for me to apply for a job as a trial commissioner in a municipal court. For those of you who do not have recent court exposure, I should explain that a trial commissioner does most of the same things a judge does. He's simply selected by the judges and works at their pleasure. And as luck would have it, I got the job. And I spent a year in that job. I was a commissioner, and I loved it. I could have done it for the rest of my life. But I have a sketchy employment history. After a year, the governor removed me from that job by making me a regular judge of the municipal court. My sponsor thought that was hilarious, largely because I was now in the same division that Disneyland was located in. I often wonder, thinking back, my father was a coal miner who largely through self-education became a coal mine superintendent. And before he got into the coal mines, he'd been a minor league ball player, a pretty good one. But my father had the outlook of a coal miner. And I wonder if somebody had gone to him 40 years ago and said, you know, your oldest son is ultimately going to live within 30 miles of Hollywood and Vine, wear a black dress to work, wear flowers while speaking to people in public. My father would have gagged, I am sure. In any event, I spent five years in the municipal court and I liked it. And I was elevated to the superior court and I spent five years there and I liked it. And an opportunity came along to retire from the superior court and go into a private venture. And I did and it turned out very well. And what I do now is I spend about three-quarters of my time as an assigned judge of the superior court in my home county and the other quarter doing arbitrations. And it's worked out very well and I enjoy it. I recommend the judiciary to any of you who are interested in staying close to your own kind. Some unusual things will happen to you. I'll never forget about 15 years ago, I was at a small Tuesday night discussion meeting in Huntington Beach, California. I like small discussion groups. They're very good for me. And this meeting had about 20 people and the honesty was so strong you could tap dance on it. And at the end of the meeting we were just drained. And the group secretary got up and said he would sign court cards and we all said the Lord's Prayer. And after the meeting was over, this older lady who was very well dressed came over to me and said, would you sign my court card? And I said, I'm sorry, but I'm not the group secretary. She said, no sir, but you are the bastard who sentenced me here. She said, I want you to remember me when I come back. I did. She brought me twice the number of meetings we had ordered her to attend. And we later became good friends. She died as a sober member of this fellowship sometime after that. A wonderful woman. But after we became friends, I said, why did you bring me back all those extra meetings? And she said, because I hated you. She said, I wouldn't have minded going to exactly the right number of meetings of Alcoholics Anonymous if I had considered it punishment. But I didn't. I liked those people. I liked the way they treated me. I liked everything they said. I liked what they did. And the more I looked forward to going to meetings, the more resentful I became. That you were ordering me to be there. So I talked to my sponsor. And she said, show him he can't do this to you. Take him twice the number of meetings. And she did. And I really wish more newcomers had that same level of spite and hatred going for them in the early days. It can be a very positive, motivating force. My sponsor and I used to talk a lot about the steps. Bill Wilson says that step one is the only step that you and I will ever be able to take completely. Thoroughly. And I believe that. I believe that the practice of the remaining steps is ongoing and constant regardless of how long you're here. We have to remind ourselves. We have to look into ourselves. The ability to work the Alcoholics Anonymous program is a craft. And like any other craft, you get better at it by practice. And that's the reason, I think, it's so necessary that no matter how long you've been sober or how short, that you go to a lot of meetings, that you listen to a lot of people, that you hear a lot of ideas, and that you consider opinions that vary from your own with regard to the steps. I'm absolutely convinced that as you do that, you develop an insight into the steps you would never otherwise have. Look at steps four through nine. If you had to give me a two-word description of what those steps are designed for, or what they're designed to do, what would it be? Let me suggest to you, guilt removal. Every alcoholic I have ever met has carried this tremendous burden of irrational guilt around with him for as long as he has been alive. I mean, we were pleading guilty to things that weren't even occurring in our neighborhood. And most of us manifested that by a certain simple attitude that governed our conduct. The fear of impending doom. I brought that into you. I was absolutely convinced that disastrous things were going to happen quickly to me, and nothing could help. And for some strange reason, after I got into and beyond the fifth step, after I had taken a thorough inventory, after I had shared it with another alcoholic in whom I had faith, a funny thing happened. Instead of having that feeling of impending doom, I developed the absolute assurance that really good things are going to happen for you and for me for as long as we continue to work this program one day at a time. We might not recognize them as they approach, but they're there. And God will continue to give you and I those good things for as long as we continue to maintain our relationship with him. Steps 10, 11, and 12 are maintenance. It's to keep me from going back to the way I was and to advance me, if you will, by teaching me to develop my contact with God and indeed to give this program away on every possible occasion. And I believe that. If there was one other step than step one that we could all do completely, thoroughly, totally well, I suggest to you that step three would be it. I am amazed at the number of people I've worked with in Alcoholics Anonymous who at one point or another in their sobriety have secretly, in the dead of night, been scared to death of their own higher power. It's amazing to me. But it happens and I went through it. Because I was raised in a conventional Protestant upbringing where God was sort of a scorekeeper or at best a spiritual CPA. Who really enjoyed keeping track of everything old Phil did that wasn't up to par and couldn't wait to get him on judgment day and really give it to him. Now that is an utterly ridiculous and childish concept of God. But that's the one I brought you. And it's the one I kept here for a period of time until I began to look seriously into this program. And to discover that I had a higher power who was all forgiving, that indeed everything you and I and everybody else in Alcoholics Anonymous has done in the past has already been forgiven us. He is all loving and he literally can't wait to give you good things. So long as you do nothing more than apply these principles to your life and continue to work the program. And I never knew that until I got here. Until I met you. I am convinced that when you and I come to Alcoholics Anonymous, we are exposed to a source of power that is infinitely greater than anything we have ever encountered before. You may put whatever label on it you like, but it's here. It's magic. And you're not entitled to use it only on your drinking problem. I would happily have used the principles of Alcoholics Anonymous for one reason only when I got here. To use Alcoholics Anonymous as a diet. So I just wouldn't have to drink. But you wouldn't let me. You kept telling me that I am required to practice these principles not with regard to my drinking problem, but in all of my affairs. So the same source of power, which has enabled me to live comfortably without alcohol for 31 years, has also enabled me to apply it in every area of my life where I apply these principles. Professionally, socially, personally, and family. And I don't know about you, but I secretly think that was what I was looking for in the bottom of all the bottles I emptied out to get here. The knowledge that people can change permanently, radically, for the better. And we do it in here almost routinely. And I never want to forget that. People can change. Right now, tonight, regardless of how long you've been sober, I'll make you this promise. If you apply these principles one day at a time to your life and make the sacrifices necessary to get there, you can go anywhere you want to go. You can become any kind of person you choose to become. You can develop yourself and do any lifestyle that you ever wanted. Provided only that it never becomes more important to you than Alcoholics Anonymous and that you do the footwork for God. And that's something I would never have known until I got here. I go to a lot of meetings. I think I could stay sober on one meeting a week. I just don't know which one it is. So I go to four or five. And so far, it's worked out fairly well. I go to a lot of meetings. I think I could stay sober on one meeting a week. I just don't know which one it is. So I go to four or five. I think I could stay sober on one meeting a week. So I go to four or five. And so far, it's worked out fairly well. I go to a lot of meetings because it's fun for me to be with you. It wasn't always fun. When I came in here, I thought Alcoholics Anonymous was about three steps lower than Skid Row. I really did. There was a guy in Pasadena who came down to my home group during my first year and described my feeling about you exactly. He read a letter in one of these Advice to the Lovelorn columns and I liked it so well I got a copy of it. And it said, Dear Abigail Van Buren, I have one brother who has just been executed for murder and a second who is doing life for rape and a third who belongs to Alcoholics Anonymous. My mother sells dope to high school kids and my father makes bathtub gin. Recently, I fell in love with a girl who has just been released from the state penitentiary after serving time for smothering her illegitimate child and I want to marry her. My question is, should I tell her about my brother who's on AA? That was just about what I thought of you. So, I go to a lot of meetings because you have become the most exciting people in my life. You are the most exciting group of people that I think anybody can find. For a very simple reason, you live in the present. You're the only group of people I know who is not shackled by the past or terrified of the future. You are already aware that God has already given us today, now, the present. That God does not have to give you and I one single extra additional thing in order for us to be happy up until bedtime tonight. If we choose to. And we have that power of choice. I go to a lot of meetings because I like to be around young people. If you define youth as consisting of those people whose aspirations are more important than their memories, Alcoholics Anonymous is the youngest group of people I know. And you're exciting because of that. I go to a lot of meetings because I don't want to forget what I thought about you when I came here. And that at some point in that first year and I don't know when, after I learned a little bit about me and a little bit about you and a little bit about the program, the thought suddenly came to me that if the richest man in the world had a drinking problem and used all of the resources at his command to find the world's best way to solve it, he'd be sitting in the chair next to yours. We give it to him for the same price we gave it to you. It's free of charge, provided you pass it along to the next drunken line. Finally, if I might close with one thought, I am convinced after talking to my sponsor and to many other people in Alcoholics Anonymous that if you and I can work the third step well enough not only to acknowledge the presence of God in our lives but to trust God with our lives, that I can make you a promise regardless of where you are in sobriety. The slate will be wiped clean. And with that trust, with a trust that you can develop in God, you can almost say that the peace of mind that you're going to enjoy is directly proportional to how much you can trust God. And as you trust God, you may safely rely upon one basic fact. The best day of your life has not yet been lived. And every day you stay sober, it gets one day closer. Thank you. Thank you for sharing your wonderful meeting.