Ron H. – Steps 6-7 Defects – Standing In A Posture Of Surrender – 1998

John H. from Albuquerque, New Mexico. Hi everybody, I'm Ron. I'm an addict. And let's just plan something right now. Just in case, uh, Roseanne, is her name Roseanne? Just in caso Roseanne shows up, when she gets up here and says, my name's Roseanne and I'm a, an addict, all of you in one voice say, clearly. Okay, so don't forget. That's your line. All right. Clearly. Okay. It is really good to be here. I am really thrilled to be here today as I'm sure a lot of you are. Can you believe we're actually here at San Jose? We've been talking about it. Money is funny. Can't afford it. How many world conventions have come and gone? And we're here! We're sitting here, yeah. That's how I'm feeling about this one. I'm really happy to be here. Since I now have an hour and a half, I'm going to start out and tell you a few stories about the old days or something. I'm thinking I really am filled with something as I look at this convention center. Thank you. I'm looking at, you know, I went and asked them if there's a place where I could go and kind of get centered and get quiet and is there, there's no like designated meditation room or anything. So they, you know there should be. Shouldn't there? Let's go have a big old ass quiet room where you walk in and everybody can sit down. But, so what they did is they brought me into where the speaker is going to be tonight in the big room. It is just humongous, and it's not the big meeting. So I go in there, and I go, like, it takes me five minutes to get to the center of the room. I sit down to do my little let's get quiet time in there. And I was thinking about this room, and I remember the first world convention that I ever went to was Wichita, Kansas in 1980. And who was there? Somebody there? Yeah, all right. Somebody was there. And I would guess certainly the room, well, I was going to say the room that we're in right now, the number of people in this room is more than were at that Saturday night at that convention. I think that's probably true. I would guess maybe 200 or 300 people were at the convention. And some of the main speakers had hitchhiked to get there. I remember that particular fact. And there was a buzz in the air about two things at that convention. One is there were some people from New York there who were saying, And we want to have the World Convention in New York, although we have one little problem. We don't have meetings in New Yorke. And the reason that we don't is it's not legal to have NA meetings in new york because if dope fiends get together, they're consorting with other known addicts and they haul them to jail. So NA is illegal in New york city. I remember the buzz about that at that convention. And I remember there was a buzz about one other thing which was this little workshop that was going on the following weekend in Lincoln, Nebraska, right up the street where they were going to finally write a basic text for Narcotics Anonymous. And there was this little dream in the air that maybe someday NA would have a basic test of its own. And two things happened after that. One of them, on the first point, a couple years later I was at a little convention in New York City that was a huge convention, the biggest convention I had ever seen, because they, I guess, had worked through that little problem. And now NA was just booming in New York City. And the feeling in my heart and the heart of a lot of people who were there was it was just overwhelming to go there and say, you know what? We're taking the barriers down. Because at that time, there's a lot of people whose got clean in a smaller town where it was maybe possible that NA wasn't going to make it. You ever have that feeling about NA in your little town? Well, there's a little kind of N.A. meeting over here where, you know, we can say the F word and talk about dope without anybody glaring at us, you know, and we can sort of like, you know, relate to each other. It's like the only meeting of its kind, and the rest of the meetings all, you know, have that kind of rarely have we seen a person fail flare about them. And so, you know, you go to your little N. A. Meeting, you can all relate to each other, but you're not quite so sure that N. A. Is going to survive. And that's the key concept here. You're not so sure that NA is even going to survive. You know you belong there. This is my story anyway. I knew I belonged there, and I got clean in Fargo, North Dakota in 1978 when I walked into my first NA meeting in Farco, andI got cleanin' in 79. It's an amazing thing, you know, somewhere out in the middle of nowhere USA to find a little NA meeting in 1979, you know what I mean? And so I'm sitting in this little meeting and dutifully... It was like my first NA meeting. I heard somebody... This is a true story. The very first NA meet the guy who first got up to the podium and it was a little podium meeting there was 12 of us and we're sitting around the table and there was a podium on one end and for the guy who first Got Up to share he was talking about how he could not for the life of him stop compulsively masturbating and and it was like you know i've been to all these meetings where they were saying you know and i almost lost my job as the chairman of the board you know and so now i'm sitting here in this little meeting where you know having a little candlelight meeting. And these guys, you know, and I found a home, not for any reason. It was the drug thing, the drug thing. But anyway, I was real happy to be home in that little NA meeting. But for a while, I kind of had, I think of it this way, I'm kind of crossing the river with one foot in two different canoes. I don't know if you've ever had that experience, not very stable. You know, there's like, I'm not so sure here because I didn't know, you know, if NA was going to be viable. And in 1982, something happened after that little other thing in Lincoln, Nebraska and some of those other places and the World Service Conference passed a basic text for Narcotics Anonymous And that was a phenomenal, phenomenal event. I remember I got my basic text, my little red basic text in the mail. And I knew how to get new good stuff and I cracked it up and smelled my book and it smelled like a new book. I read that book cover to cover and this feeling in my heart is like, holy shit. NA is going to make it. NA is real. NA is viable. And, you know, back at that point, I picked up my foot out of that other canoe and I sat down in this canoe and I picked up a paddle. And I have not stopped paddling in that NA canoe. And, You know, I look around this room and I sit in that big old meeting over there and I say, Man, I am so lucky to have found Narcotics Anonymous. Now, what did you do to deserve what you got today? What did you deserve sitting in this chair? I screwed over everybody that ever loved me. I ripped and ran, and I tried to be honest and real and true and all that, but I was a loser. What did I do to deserve standing here at this podium? I guess what I did is I breathed in and out and I learned to trust the loving God because that's where it comes from. You know, that's where this comes from. It's not about deserving. I had to come here and get clean and walk through everything I walked through to come to the simple understanding that this is just a gift that's just freely given. And I like the theme of today's workshop because it says, you know, it says putting down the baggage or whatever it is, something like that. Getting rid of the baggage, right? It's like... Letting go of the package. What? Letting goes of the luggage. Letting gos of the baggages, okay. And because my experience around here at Narcotics Anonymous, there's very, very little of value that I've gotten since I've been clean that's come from picking up something new. It's almost always about putting something down. It' s almost always putting things down and then what happens on a dynamic natural level is where the value comes in. I was reading something recently that just really struck me. It said there's this little village, and God knows where, this little village in God knows where, and outside of this village there's a tree, and there's a fence built around this tree, and whenever people come, you know, the parents tell their children, don't go near that tree. That's a poison tree. You need to avoid that tree, and the village has built this fence to protect the children from the tree. And after some time of avoiding the tree, one day, sure enough, some little kid goes in there and he ends up getting really, really sick. And so the villagers say, we need to go and cut down that tree. Why are we leaving that tree even there? Why don't we just go cut it down? We've already tried to build a fence around it, and that wasn't enough. We need to come up with a plan. So they all get together and they go to cut down the tree, and they get there and the medicine man is standing by the tree and he says, no, you don't want to cut down this tree. This is a medicine tree. This is the tree that my generations of my family have been coming to to get the medicine to cure and heal you people for all these generations. You just didn't know. You just thought of it as the poison tree. And I was listening to this and I was thinking, that's a lot like what we're doing here. that, I don't know how many of you felt like a poison tree, but I lived my life like a poison tree. Mothers telling their sons, don't go by him. You know, don's, he'll make you sick. And, you know, people wanting to build a little fence around me. You know? And in the end, realizing, I had to come to Narcotics Anonymous and I had work the steps and I have to add this to my life in order to get no, no, that's not poison, that is medicine. That can be used to make a difference. Some other people can get healed because of what I used to think was my poison, the sickness inside of me. And that's the power of the 12 steps of N.A. That's the Power of what we're doing here at this convention is we are a bunch of damn poison trees, you know, a bunch a damn forest of poison trees sitting here and learning how to see ourselves as medicine trees. You know, I mean that whole thing just really came alive for me that just the realization that it's the poison that's also turned into the medicine and that's the that's what the steps that's a power in the steps. I used to think I was going to go to the steps and get kind of like somehow you know not have all the not be who I am in the end. That was in fact my fear of the steps I won't be who I am I'll change and I'll be something different And in fact, what's happened is I am who I am. I'm more truly who I are now today than I ever have been. Character defects and all. You know, and I guess I'm thinking of times early on when I came to the sixth and seventh step when I said, you know, God, let's just take an example that probably a few people can relate to. Let's just say lust is the character defect. Like, I was thinking about that. My workshop is four o'clock at the beginning of the convention and I grew up as a nice little Catholic boy who, you know, in the beginning of the Mass day I would say, let us call to mind our sins at the very beginning. Oh, that's perfect. We're going to do a six and seven workshop at the beginningof the convention. Let's call to remind our character, do you think? Anyway, if you take, for example, lust. I remember my early relationship with the steps. I would think, okay, God, remove my lusts, you now. Or at least aim it right, you kno. So you just get it, like, pointed in the right direction. That would be all. That would have been enough, you know? And then I would go away from that, you know, and I'd do some amends. And I'd think, it's not gone. You know, it is. It's not going. You know? So apparently the steps don't work. Obviously they don't. Because I still have this left thing, and it doesn't always want to point in the right direction, you know? And so there's something wrong here, You know, and I have, you know, I had all throughout high school, all throughout, you Know, growing up, all throughout my addiction, I always had a girlfriend and I always cheated. You know? And I always kind of saw myself as one who didn't. But, you Now, if you're loaded enough and the situation, and, You Know, there's circumstances and stuff happens and you end up cheating, You know. End up, You Now, just acting out and then hurrying up and getting back to the guy who doesn't do that, you know? And it was a low-integrity way to live my life. I did not have integrity. And so when I look back right now from where I'm standing, I'm sitting here tonight with 19 years clean. I'm married to... Thank you. And I echo what Chuck said. I understand what we're applauding there, and it feels good to applaud that, that it does work. You know, you keep coming back. It does work. And anyway, I'm married to a woman who just celebrated 20 years last month. And she and I met in Narcotics Anonymous. We've been married for a while. We've Been Married for 16 Years. Have I, during that 16-year period, been liberated from lust? No. Have I during that16-year-period always had that lust aiming right squarely at my wife? No. Have I cheated on that woman? No. No. So, you know, and I might have said yes. If we were talking about it, that's why I picked that character defect, by the way. because I can say no to that. And the reason I can say no, is not because what I thought I was praying to have removed is now gone, but that the character, the underlying character problem has shifted for me. And I can be a man of my word today. I have that choice today. When I'm powerless over my addiction and I'm feeding my addiction, I'm living in this drained, disempowered state, I don't have that kind of choice. I can think I do, you know, I can try to and I can... But bottom line is I never lived that. And when I got to Narcotics Anonymous and learned how to live clean and learn how to work stiff, I did find some integrity in my life. That to me, the word character in that step, defects of character, that's a powerful word. I almost didn't notice that word for a long time. It's something about the way that we're... what we're made of. Can a dope fiend, can an addict actually learn to live with integrity? You know, well, it's not an overnight process. It's not a, you know, instantaneous transformation. But I say the answer is yes. A dope fiend can come to Narcotics Anonymous and learn how to live with integrity. And that, to me, is a profound and powerful reality of our lives. And that doesn't mean that everything's pretty. It doesn't means I come here and just say everything's wonderful and I'm now Mr. Good Boy and all that, but I can learn here how to live with integrity and I can do it by learning to have a relationship with the power greater than myself. In order for me to put the sixth and seventh step in context, let me say something about the steps that come before them. First of all, somebody once said a long time ago something that I never forgot. He said, I came to Narcotics Anonymous and I listened to people talk about this stuff He said, something became real clear in terms of my relationship with God. He said one of us is powerless and one of us is all powerful. And now the trick in the steps is figuring out which one is which. Getting clear remembering at all times who's who at that zoo. I frequently forget which one I am in that picture. And when I look at the first step. We admitted we were powerless over our addiction. That's the phrasing of that step, by the way. Much has been said and much will continue to be said about that. I say the fact that you and I use different drugs, how many different drugs do you suppose are represented in this room right now? How many different kind of like cultural pockets around using drugs do you think there are in this room? You know, in terms of like they're talking about our diversity is our strength. Different ways of using, different manners of delivering that drug to the system. Different, you know, there's college boys in here who were using drugs and college girls, whatever, who were doing it. Who were using dogs and were failing in that, you know, and that's what got them to a bottom. There are people here who, you who were born in poverty and lived there forever, and they're people who wereborn to wealth and never experienced poverty. Those kinds of things are not what we have in common, but we do have in communethe disease of addiction. So what if it said, we admit that we are powerless over, you know, pick a drug, pick a group of drugs, pick a delivery method. You know, it doesn't say that. It says we admit we are powerless over our addiction that to me is a very powerful principle that I can base my recovery on and you and I can based our unity on. And, you know, the first step for me, my own admission that I'm powerless over the disease of addiction and, you now, do I have a drug problem? I certainly had a drug problems just before I came into Narcotics Anonymous and I certainly came to Narcotic Anonymous not because I... I did come to N.A. saying, you know, I have these underlying feelings of disconnect with humanity, and I need to find a program that will awaken my spirit and magically connect me to the universe. Those thoughts were not in my mind. I've got to figure out how to quit putting drugs in my system one day at a time so that I can learn how to be free from this monster. I mean, I did not come gently to Narcotics Anonymous. I fought and fought and thought. And I wasn't always fighting other people. I was fighting my disease. I got to the point where I don't want to be an addict anymore, Mr. Wizard. I don'T want to BE like this anymore. And I just couldn't switch that off. And so it was really, really kind of an amazing thing for me to come and sit in a meeting of Narcotics Anonymous and listen to people share about the same kind of relationship with their drug as I had with mine. In fact, just last week I was sitting at a meeting and I was listening to a guy share. He's fairly new. And he had some what he said is, he said the insanity for me with my using is that there's only like you know 30 seconds where that drug just really, really, really feels good. You know, there's only like 30 seconds where it hits me and I go, oh, you know, and I got it. That's the moment, that's that moment, you Know? And then after that, then I'm chasing it. You know, I'm trying to get back there. I'm dumping things on top of it. I can't get back to that point. And boy, that brought me back. That brought me back 20 years, 25 years, you know, just thinking that was exactly what it was like for me, the insanity of addiction. And, you know, the second step doesn't say we came to believe that we could stop using. Good, because that's really kind of what it is in a way. But it doesn't. It says we came TO BELIEVE THAT A POWER GREATER THAN OURSELVES COULD RESTORE US TO SANITY. You know, it points right here. It points right where the problem lies. And it points Right to the thing I was treating before with drugs. I've heard a lot of people in NAC, foreign addicts who come to NA, the drugs are not the problem. The drugs are the solution. But they're a solution which sort of creates a problem. There's a little circularity to this solution. It kind of gets back around and creates a problems and everything kind of erodes from there. But really, you know, I'm just parroting everybody else like most of us do when we get up here. Some guy said, if drugs are the problem, then I got good news for you. Especially those of you who might be new who are thinking, I really don't want to be here. Why am I? I don't know. This sucks. Got great news for You. If drugs are your problem, then you don't need all this because the solution is real simple. Don't use drugs. Right? Because if drugs aren't a problem and you don' t use drugs, you just remove the problem. And now you just go on about your married business. You might need a little medical intervention or something because some drugs are harder to kick than others. But then they're gone, right? You walk out of detox, a new person's free. Glad I learned that lesson. If drugs are the problem, detoxes turn out winners. If drugs were the problem you know, toilet seats are the tools of recovery. But the steps tell me something else. The steps tell me that my addiction is the problem. And drugs are the, like, former solution to this disconnect that I feel that, you know, whatever it is, that you guys know intuitively and I don't have to describe for you and I know intuitively this malaise, this sickness, this what's wrong with me? What's going on here? and this sense that I felt, anyway, of being disconnected to humanity somehow. I just didn't get to go. Whatever lifeboat you guys were on, I didn't gets to go and Narcotics Anonymous comes floating by at some point in my life and all these hands are saying, come on, and I got in the boat and I can't tell you that I got into the boat and got in here and said, guess what? I'm in NA now and I feel totally connected to humanity now. Thank you, you know. I came in, this part of the meeting that we're in right now, that was the easy part, right? We're all sitting there and paying attention to someone else or maybe when it's our turn we'll say our little piece and then we can... That part of it is fairly easy but what about that part when it is all over and you are brand new and now everybody is going to want to hug you and stuff. For me it was like somebody inside me knew that I needed all of that kind of stuff, but man, was that painful. Oh, man. You know, we're going to have all our little smallpox now. And then if we're lucky, we're gonna go out to Denny's, right? I don't know what I would ever do if I got clean. Well, you know, we go to Deny's. We drink coffee, you Know. Like, sign me up for that, home. NA is hard to see. From a certain vantage point, NA is hard to say just how powerful this thing is and what's going on here is a little bit harder to see I'm just so glad that I kept coming back because all those little things are so simple and so true just keep coming back and this restoration to sanity in the second step starts to happen and I start to see it start to be what NA is and it starts to come home to my to me to my heart it's It's not up in the head. I just kept coming back. And, you know, the third step talks about a decision, doesn't it? You say, what's the kind of core action in the third steps? Somebody might say, turn our will and life over to God, right? But that isn't the core action in the first step. The core action is we made a decision to. That's the third thing. and then the steps that go beyond it are what help us actually get there. We made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to care of God as we understood it. Okay, let me see by show of hands how many people in this room right now are not from the United States? All right, we've got some. Just by way of interest Is there anyone here from England? Someone from England, I heard that. Yeah. Somebody who doesn't like being the center of attention from England. Okay. Well, some time ago, a long time ago there was a war between our country and their country. And now trust me on this. I'm going to bring this right back to N.A. here in a minute. Some time ago. There was a world war between us two countries. And we sort of achieved some independence, or so the story goes, and now we are a country of our own. Okay, here's a little history quiz for you all. Now, are you ready? I want you to tell me what year we won the Revolutionary War and achieved our independence from Great Britain. What year? Okay. somebody now see there's two kinds of addicts there's 2 kinds of addict the kinds that go to school and just want to be the good student and know it all get it all right and then there's the other that just says screw you I don't need that shit right so I heard the room divide and I heard from both of you some of you said 1776 and those are the screw you people I don' t need that kind of because you know what year it was? 1789. 1789 so then why, what's this thing about July 4th, 1776, why do we celebrate like this big independence on July 4th but it says it was 1789 that we won that war now I'm going to take it back to the steps because we declared it so that day and then we had some shit to handle we said we said I am free I am free right now and 13 years later after like Valley Forge and all this you know it happened it was real we made it happen to me there's energy like that in the third step I made a decision to turn my will and my life over to care of God as I understand God. My life is in the care of God as I understand God, and now I got some shit to handle. Thus we have a fourth step. What is that? What is that stuff we've got to handle? To me, the power in the third step, in this decision, it's not that we're there now. When I did my third step I wasn't like now basking on some beach of spiritual recovery, I was like still squirrely as hell, you know, trying to hope that maybe there was something real about all this, but I declared it so. I made a decision to turn my will and my life over to the care of God because I understand God. And then, you Know, some of the workshops that came before me, they were talking about the fourth and fifth step, which there's many, many good things said there about getting honest with myself and facing it. And then we get to the sixth and seventh step, what we're here to talk about. And since I'm in a kind of a teacher mode now, let's go to the English class now just for a second. Have you ever noticed this? Have you never noticed that the verb in the sixth step is not an action verb and it's the only step that does not have an action word in it? We were entirely ready to... It's a verb of being, right? We were. We were ready. It does not describe an action. Every other step has an action verb in it. What's that worth? I don't know. You tell me. But I'll tell you what I... It's not quite as powerful as the declaration thing, but it'll do. Now, to me the significance of that is that the sixth step kind of says we were entirely ready to have God remove all these defective characters. There's the action. Who's doing the action in the sixth steps? God is. Or we were entire We were entirely ready to have God do that. So for me, first of all if we were the who's going to be in the World Series this year? I don't know. I don' t pay attention to baseball. The Cubs, okay. No, he said the Braves, the Yankees, okay? If we were on our way to the World Series and we were... Now, let's say that we were in the World series. We're a baseball team. And we were entirely ready to play game one. What does that mean? It means that we've done some things, you know? We've taken some action up to this point. We have gotten entirely ready. So it's a kind of a statement of where we're standing right now. The sixth step to me is a statement of the ground I'm standing on. When I'm standing on this ground, I am entirely ready to have God remove all these defects of character. That is awesome. You know, that is daunting when you think... At least for me it was. It was daunting. I stood on that ground and said, God, please don't make me weird, you know? Not bad enough, you Know? It's like, I don't want to go, like, hand out pamphlets and be like, you Now? but bottom line is I am ready to have God remove all these defects of character which means I'm going to change when I humbly ask God to remove these defects of character I better be ready for some change and I don't necessarily get to be the engineer of that change and that's okay you know that's the power in the sixth and seventh step to me it's about standing in this posture of surrender you know learning how to stand in a posture of surrender It's one thing to surrender, you know, to be like up against the wall and be, you know, at the end and, you know, I give up, I give up. I give up finally. That's one thing, the act of surrender. But the sixth and seventh step, it seems to me, says something about standing in a posture of ongoing surrender. And that's a higher bar for me. Because I could surrender when I was using. You know, you get me to a certain point and I could, you know, give up and go work, try something else. But to actually get to that point where the ideal that I'm coming from is to stand here in this surrendered way, that to me is what the sixth step describes. And then the seventh step, the seventh step for me is like this sacred kind of holy personal private place thing that I do when I'm standing on that spot. When I first heard the 6th and 7th, I heard the 12th step. I went to early meetings and listened to reading the 12 steps. And I remember this. This is true. This is not just a cute story you make up later. I remember looking at the 6ths step and going, I don't get that one. We were entirely ready to and then we did. They just wanted 12 so they threw one more. They like that number, 12. You know, 12 tribes of Israel and, like, 12 apostles and, you know. So we're going to have 12, so we say. And you see it in other steps, too, like the third step. We made a decision. You know? We came to believe. We made the decision. You know. We made an oath. We made this list. We made these amends. Yeah, okay, that's handy. You know! Now we get to have twelve. So I looked at the sixth step, and I really said basically an empty step. It's just a thing you say before you do it. I so clearly disagree with my earlier perception on that now. That sixth step is so powerful, and it comes right on the heels of the fifth step where I finally for once got honest all the way down to my toes. Pepe used to say some of you know or heard tapes or knew Pepe was one of our old timers here who had he been alive right now would have been here tonight and big in the hearts of a lot of people here he was a terrific member of N.A. who'd been around since the late 50s and was just a stand up guy he used to stay what the hell did Pepe say again? actually I built up my Pepe thing to the point now where I can't remember what it was I remember, it was about honesty. He said there's an old adage that's as old as the hills, the truth shall set you free. And this is an adage that addicts did not have a good relationship with. And a lot of us come here totally, totally not free. You know, and with a warped idea of what free is. Free is I get to do whatever the hell I want, say whatever the hill I want whenever the hell I want and screw all of you, that's free. And coming here and learning this thing about surrender and character and commitment and some of the things that we learn around here, he said the steps are an exercise in telling the truth. He'd tell the truth right off the bat. First step, we admitted we were powerless over our dreams that our lives had become unmanageable. And there's several points in the steps, fourth and fifth step, humongous exercise in selling the truth, telling it to myself and then telling it to you. And, you know, the tenth step is another one of those. I'm just going to learn to tell the truth. The tenth step, however, just as a slight aside, is just a little bit wrong. You know, we could improve on it just a Little Bit, and here's how. If it was really for addicts, instead of saying, you know,"We continue to take personal inventory when we were wrong, promptly admitted it," it would say, We continue to take personal inventory, and when we were wrong and sufficient time had passed, such that we didn't have to eat so much shit. We pleaded guilty to a lesser offense. Isn't that the addict? But anyway, it doesn't say that and I guess we'll have to live with the one we got. And it's about telling the truth, and it's a good thing. It's about killing the truth promptly. I've learned in my own life this little promptly clause in the 10th step is one of the more powerful things that the steps offer. You could say that about a lot of things, but that's certainly one of them. And the reason for that is like, let's say my wife and I are going at it. We're going at het. I'm right. I know I'm wrong. And she knows she's right. And so we're so goddamn right, we're about ready to get a divorce. And there's a little voice in the back of my head saying, you know, Ron, every time you're this goddamn right you're probably wrong. And it's probably time to stand right here right now and tell her, you know what? I'm being an asshole. I'm sorry. You know, it's problem. It's probably fine to do that right now. And when that little voice whispers back there someplace The tenth step says promptly, you know? And that step is very powerful. I would like to say that I just sort of heroically rose to that, but you know what? My wife heroically arose to that a lot more than I did and she taught me how to do that. And I learned from her. You know what, we can drain the juice right out of this boil, you oil, you know, just promptly. It's true, though, isn't it? It's an icky metaphor, but it's real. But we were talking only moments ago about the six and seven steps. I don't know. I think I'm going to wrap this up, even though that's going to put us in a position where we're, I guess, done with the workshop unless there's a volunteer to come up and take the other shot. But what I would like, I just want to close this up with a thought on the sixth and seventh step that the, has anybody ever hitchhiked in this room? I used to do a fair amount of hitchhiking in my day. And, you know, part of this is about being a... I was not an addict from an urban culture. I was an addict from a rural culture. I was in a rural area and I was with an addict from a small town in an area of small towns. I grew up in northern Minnesota, you know. And so I did a fair amount of hitchhiking. And so this metaphor really makes some sense to me. If my relationship with God, I'm standing by the side of the road hitchhicking, right? and I've got this pack on my back, and it's heavy, and it is burning its hole in my shoulders, and I'm tired, and cars are going by, and they're going by. And all of a sudden, this old man comes by in a pickup. He's got his big old hound dog sitting on the seat. He pulls over, and he says to me, hop in the back. He says, you know, the hound dogs have got this stuff, so go in the bag. So I go in the back of the pickup, and I am standing there with my backpack on my bed. The wind is blowing, and the guy takes off and I'm standing there and I think I can do this and my backpack is burning it's holes in my shoulders and I am tired and this old man is in the pickup he is looking back at me and he is going this guy is an idiot you know I am giving him a ride here and he's standing there with his backpack it looks like he is about ready to die so he pulls over to the side of the road and he says what is going on with you and he said why don't you just take that pack off your back and sit down and I say oh no sir or you've been good enough to give me a ride, I wouldn't expect you to carry my burden for me also. Like, is there a little flaw in this logic? How many of us have approached the program that way? I'm going to come here and I'm gonna get clean and I am not going to put down my burden. I am NOT going to PUT THIS SHIT DOWN. You know what the 6th and 7th step says? that says you can get in the back of that pickup and you can take the pack off your back and set it down. You can turn around and sit down and you don't even know where the driver is going anymore and that's perfectly okay. Thank you for letting me share. Thank you.