Step 6 and the Dilemma of Grow or Go – Sandy B.

I was privileged to hear our speaker tonight, a few years ago, in Palm Springs. And he is a tremendous speaker and I was very impressed with him and I'm sure you will be too. Sandy B. Well, good evening everybody My name is Sandy Beach and I'm an alcoholic How are you all doing? It is indeed a pleasure to be here tonight And I wish I had been here for the whole week And could stay another week This is a well-kept secret up here What a beautiful place and being back amongst all of you West Coast A.A.ers, recharge my batteries at least for another six months and then I'll try to sneak back out here. It seems that all the enthusiasm and excitement in A.H. starts on the West Coast and builds up a big wave and starts rolling across the country and the next thing you know we're adopting all sorts of things that have started out here and then claim them as our own. you know, as we get into them later on. But I did come into Alcoholics Anonymous on Pearl Harbor Day in 1964. 64 was indeed a good year. And I haven't been drunk since that first meeting. Excuse me. And I owe it all to not drinking. That is my opinion on why I haven't been drunk is due just to not drinking. That's all. There is no other thing. So if there's anybody new here and you've been working around and going to meetings and working on the steps and doing all kinds of things, but you keep getting drunk, I would check your drinking. This is... It's that funny little thing about that. A lot of times we're not up front about it. We get talking about powerless over alcohol. And, you know, if you're new, you could go, yes, that's true. I'll drink to that. So if you haven't been told directly, this program involves not drinking. You know? And it's like we know it strikes terror in the hearts of all true alcoholics to say those words. And so I think we try and disguise them so you'll keep coming around. but I'm not that subtle, so I have to just let the cat out of the bag that there aren't going to be too many meetings where there's alcohol served. That was one of the reasons I did not want to stay in AA. It terrified me to think of not drinking, just the concept of going through a day without alcohol and then thinking ahead, which is the normal state of mental condition, And I think in the beginning it was just me projecting ahead and wondering how in the world I could survive the next month or year or ten years without alcohol. It was just overpowering because it was so important in my life. And yet there's just no way to get around the fact that that is what is required, as tough as it may be. And I thank God for that. I think that when we get through our first day of sobriety, we have just gone through the roughest day we will ever have, No matter how bad it gets in the years ahead, you can always just go, hell, it's nothing compared to that first day of trying to withdraw and deal without alcohol and all those jangled nerves and fears of the unknown and this AA people. We've got to remember how terribly overpowering this whole situation was when we were new. People running around, happy, no drinking. and wondering what the angle was. Why do they like me? I don't even have any money left. What are they after? My body? If you could have seen me then, you would have ruled that out. There's a very rough period in the beginning and that's why we need each other so much. But anyway, I always start out a talk that way if I remember to that I owed all the not drinking. But that isn't really the miracle of Alcoholics Anonymous, I don't think, the fact that we don't drink. I think the miracle is that we get happy with not drinking Now we're talking about miracles. Not drinking, that's no big miracle. A lot of us have been locked up. I was in jail and I was a nut ward for almost six months and I Was sober and it was due 100% to not drinking but I was not happy so we didn't have a miracle so in my opinion it's getting happy with life no matter how it is that you indeed are operating in the realm of miracles and I heard a speaker years and years ago and I really believe this that if you're an Alcoholics Anonymous and you're not happy you're doing it wrong that it's that simple it has nothing to do with oh, I've got bad health problems or I just got fired or I'm upset or I've just got divorced all of those things are attributable to not doing it right that is how powerful the program is I mean, to sell that short is to underestimate a higher power that is to go back to Bush League higher powers like vodka and whatever yours was. Sure, they couldn't operate on that high a level, but we're dealing here with a whole new ballgame and we're doing it again. We're dealing with mega powers and certainly we see amongst us examples of this all the time. People with very serious illnesses who spend their whole time worrying about other people. Well, have you gone and you're checking up on this guy? They can't even get out of their bed and they're still concerned on how the 12-step work is going in the group and let's do that. And then the selfish thought hardly enters in there and we see that and wonder how that's possible and we find answers here and we get inspired to possibly explore whether we might be capable of that someday and that leads us to think along those lines. And I've always liked that sentence there that if you're not happy, you're doing it wrong. If I'm not happy I'm doing it right. it wrong. Because it gives me a great hope that the world will always be just right for me. And that was one of my most serious problems. I'm a typical alcoholic neurotic. And I don't know, I haven't met too many non-neurotics in Alcoholics Anonymous. We seem to... As As a matter of fact, I haven't met very many non-neurotic human beings. The more I think about it, that seems to be just the nature of being a human being is to have great worries about what people are thinking about us and how am I going to make out here and why do I feel so fearful and what are the answers to all these questions and all these things. And here is an opportunity and one of the greatest to get answers to these things and the power to carry those answers out. And I'm most grateful that I was bounced in to Alcoholics Anonymous. I, like almost everyone else, came here under duress. I have not met too many people whose story, who get up here behind the podium and say, well, I was sitting in my living room one night and I got thinking about my drinking. And I said, you know, if I keep drinking a few more years, I could be in trouble down the road somewhere. I think I'll just mosey on in to Alcoholics Anonymous and save all the trouble that's liable to come to me in the years ahead. Generally, that isn't how we get here. There is generally some little behind-the-scenes. We may claim that's how we got here, but when we get honest, later on there's little stories like we come home and our family is packed for a vacation and we aren't going. Or our boss calls us in and says, Hey, you got a minute, Joe? I want you to meet your replacement. Give him a quick briefing. This stuff's all packed here. Well, I didn't know there was a problem. I know you didn't. You didn't even know there wasn't a problem, that's the problem. or a doctor gets us in there and his advice is not to buy any long-playing records that he is going to explain advanced liver damage as basically as he can. And all of a sudden we were panicked, you know. What can I do about it? Well, AA can help. All right, I'll be there. Off we are and we're here under duress. And more recently, we're getting the judges involved. And I always like that story about the guy who's in front of the judge and the judge is saying, you've been here three times for being drunk this year. I'm going to have to really get tough with you this time. It's either one AA meeting or a year in jail. And the guy stands there about 20 minutes trying to make his mind up. You know, you might get a drink in jail, but you're not going to get one at the AA meeting. And there's something final about Alcoholics Anonymous. There's something infinitely mysterious about it. Even though we don't know a thing about it, we've heard rumors. We've known people who went there and we never saw them again in the bar. You know, and And around the bar they go And those AAs got him I don't know what happened to him I'm afraid to talk to him He looks funny He's on something He's high But I don' t know what the hell it is And so we have a lot of misinformation We seem to specialize in that I don't know about you. We seem to collect misinformation as a way of life prior to coming into Alcoholics Anonymous. Bill knew what he was writing about when he said, old ideas availed us nothing. We have a whole entire lifetime of collecting wrong facts and then defending them to the death. It's my plan, and I will not change it. So we get here under duress, And my duress came about not from the doctors or the judges. It came about from a corpsman in the Navy. I was temporarily stationed in a nut ward at this moment in time, and I'd been in there about two months when a corpsmen came in and said, all drunks fall in. And I was one of the drunks that had been locked up in the nut ward along with three or four others and we hustled out and it was one of these right-faced forward march and I was at an AA meeting so that's how I got to AA, under duress, the worst duress being marched down the hallways of the Bethesda Naval Hospital into an AA meet and sitting down there where the local AA group had finally talked the psychiatrist into allowing AA back into the hospital. It had been in there for a while, and then the doctors thought it through. And in their infinite wisdom in the early 60s, now you've got to realize things have changed very dramatically since then, but at that point in time there was much more ignorance about the illness than there is now. And in Their Infinite Wisdom they had decided that AA was screwing up their whole program and they would go back to the analysis bit. And AA had succeeded in getting back in, and so they started AA again. That's why I'd been there two months and hadn't been to an AA meeting. And I sat there and listened to these people and resented it. I resented... I was thinking at the time, I remember the main thing that was bothering me were my privacy rights. How could this happen where complete strangers could be exposed to the fact that I had a drinking problem and, you know, they could go out and tell the world. Who were these guys? I didn't know who they were. They weren't even Marines. They were just civilians who came walking in with all this bravado about AA and how wonderful it was and at the end of the meeting I went up in my usual style which bordered on panic arrogance. You know, there's that absolute trembling, frightened, stuffed shirt kind of a mixture that many of us alcoholics have. It's that feeling above everybody at the same time being inferior to everything that moves and wondering what's wrong as you focus, float through life in that confused state. And I remember going up to this little red-headed guy, and I said to him, that was really interesting what you had to say, and we appreciate you coming over here. And if I ever run into a guy with a drinking problem, I would probably send him around to see you. And he poked me in the chest a couple times. That's a big technique back in the Washington area is chest poking. And they go, all right, wait a minute, buddy. Let me ask you a question. Which one of us is going to put his overcoat on and mosey on out to his car and drive on home to his family like a regular person? and which one of us is going to put his little blue bathrobe back on and go over and get in that elevator and go up and get locked up like an animal. Now, which one are you? And I remember, I couldn't believe this guy would talk that way. I was in a total state of shock and just stayed that way for a few months until I met my sponsor who was much worse, It was much worse, but this guy left me with my first bout with the truth. I had avoided the truth like the plague, and this guy had given me that first taste of what it's like for people to stop going around our problem. You know how we get carried along by unknowing friends who will carry us along. Oh, you're going to be all right. Try and taper off. This is my first time somebody just went, Yeah, you're locked up. And point it to results. And I've noticed that in Alcoholics Anonymous, we spend a lot of time talking about results rather than theory. Have you noticed that? If you're new, you come in here and maybe you're an agnostic, and you come In and you go, well, let me explain agnesticism to your sponsor. And your sponsor says, explain agnosticism to me when you stop dry heaving. So we stop dry heaving, and then we come back to explain agnosticism to him. And he says, explain it to me when you get a job. Explain it to мне when you've been sober six months. Explain it zu mir after you have some results that it does anything. And we are always having the results of our life compared with the results of everybody in AA, which is very unfair, but it works. It works beautifully. On the one hand, we have your theory about life And whatever it may be And I see you're wearing a wristband from the local nut ward Very interesting theory Now, we We who own our own ties And several of us have sport jackets and all of that We have these 12 steps, and this is what it produces. And then we show them to the whole audience. And we go, this is the result of this, and you're the result if your plan. So far, we think this would be better. And we're so used in the bars to arguing about the theory and all of the bi-play and the interlocks and all of the subtle nuances of whatever spiritual denial we were packaging at the time, and people here don't want to hear any of that. They just want to talk results. So what we're going to have to do is get some results. And so we come in here and start trying to get them, and as most of us find out, we try all different ways, and we end up finally abandoning them reluctantly and tossing our hat in with the winners, And lo and behold, we are suddenly converted, as they say, to this party line. And then we go out bragging about results and are as equally unreasonable with the next new person who is coming in with their philosophy. And we go, don't talk philosophy, let's talk results. And they know how tough it's going to be. Very unfair, but it's very effective. It keeps a lot of people alive. It gets everybody sober. And I suppose we'll continue it forever. But anyway, this fellow gave me my indoctrination into AA and I'll just spend a little bit. I'm a primary alcoholic, which means I drank socially 10-15 minutes across the line. At that point, I don't relate at all to people who talked about years and years of trouble-free drinking. I have no idea what that might even feel like. Trouble-free Drinking? I have not idea what it might even FEEL like. Trouble Free Drinking?? I thought trouble was part of the excitement. I just, um... What'd you do? Just sit there? I would have returned the bottle. This stuff is broken, sir. Drank a whole fifth and nothing happened. And so, um, indeed I was. I, you know, just started drinking and immediately lost control. Always drank, always got drunk, always in trouble, and always felt guilty. I bring the typical Catholic background to the advanced guilt crowd. You're guilty no matter how it turns out. It's just, it is a separate way of life unto its own. You can make guilt a higher power. And they said, well, as long as I'm guilty enough, maybe I'll get some brownie points later on. I had this tremendous fixation with purgatory, often the future and how many years everything was costing and the mental calculator going. And those of you that have heard me before know I just had problems in teenage years with impure thoughts. I still remember that, wrestling with that one night, trying to figure out how many years per second these thoughts were costing me. And I'm going, God, I'm getting this fleeting pleasure. I mean, that's a thousand years later on, you know? And I was able to rationalize it even then. Well, a thousand year's hell would be like going like that. Time probably goes by faster when you're dead. What the hell did I know, you now? But I was always re-explaining things so that I could keep on doing what I wanted to, you know. It's a very normal human behavior, but it gets us in trouble later on. But anyway, that was sort of my background. I don't want to spend a lot of time on that. Suffice it to say, drinking was an apparent answer to everything. All of the typical teenage problems of not knowing who you are, being inadequate, not knowing how to mix with people and how to carry on conversations. I related with Teddy. I could speak in AA for years before I could read anything. Reading was too, you were boxed in. You didn't have any elbow room to get off and tell a joke or slide over here doing your reading. And I would just, that was a terrible thing. I still don't like to do it. It was very, I was worried about so many different things. And drinking fixed all that. It was a strange thing as I look back on drinking because now I've had a chance to keep thinking and looking at it from a different perspective and after hearing so many of you speak, I keep getting a different way of explaining drinking and my latest one, which will probably be gone next year, but my latest ones really is that it was my higher power. In all aspects, it followed the exact analogy of a higher power It was something I had absolute faith in and I didn't understand how it worked any more than I understand how this higher power works. You know, and you hold the bottle up and you look in there. How does that stuff work? How could you just take this and pour it down and in about two minutes intuitively know how to handle situations that used to baffle you? You know what I mean? Saying, I don't know what the hell to do now. But I do know what to do so that I will know how to know what they're doing now. Blah, blah, blah. And then I go, oh yeah, we'll go over here and go over there. What the hell's the problem? They go, boy, I could make decisions. Everything was clear as a bell. It changed the entire world that I lived in, you know, just like the steps promised us. We no longer lived in a hostile world. They talk about that in the 11th step. Once we get this connection with our new higher power. That's how I felt. I was in a room full of hostile people. They're all looking around. They go what's that guy doing here? He doesn't belong with us. He does not fit in with us I had those feelings in college, in the Marine Corps, everywhere. And then I would look at them and I'd go, God, I can see it in their eyes. I can seeing pure, raw hostility. That's what I always saw in people's eyes as they looked. And what I saw was curiosity. They're going, What the hell is that guy doing over there? You know, standing around the corners of the room lurking and wondering, Where am I supposed to be? You know that kind of stuff. Which group am I suppose to walk up to and start talking to? not that one look at those guys they're looking at me and they don't want me over there maybe this one oh well I'll circle the room and see what's going on and pretty soon people are going let's see does that guy belong here you know hey you and then you do what most neurotics do you leave and the anxiety level goes way down you ever notice that if you go away the anxiety levels go way down it's a typical solution to problems just go away from them geographical cures just move away and yet drinking was a magic. You took this crowd of 50, 60 people whatever it was I would drink two drinks and in the process of consuming that alcohol those 60 people would somehow be funneled out of the room and 60 of the most wonderful friendly people would be funneling back in. I mean these are the warm people they're all going hey man come on over to our group we want you over here and they're going no we want them over here I can't have him over there. He's going to tell us a joke. All right, and they're fighting over me now. That's what was going on before. I thought I saw hostility. They're just arguing back and forth over who's goingto get me. All of a sudden, I was the most popular guy there. And the only thing that had happened was I had had a drink. That's all that had happen. I had changed the whole world I lived in through this power that was there. And I began to develop... Primary alcoholics, I think, just develop quicker faith than the secondary alcoholics. You, you secondary alcoholists were non-believers for a long time. Eventually you came around totally relied on alcohol but up till then you were doing other things and us primary guys we got right in there. We pledged our allegiance immediately and I think the first week that I was drinking I knew that for the rest of my life this would be part of it. I didn't know how or what, but I knew this would be part of it. It would facilitate things. It would add to an already fun evening. It would take away fears. It would help me figure out things. And it was there forever. There was a few drawbacks. He got arrested. He had car wrecks. People complained about it sometimes. They didn't understand. And they had no idea of the dynamics of this thing. They didn't know how to use it. They were dulling away in some mediocre existence. And you know what I related to mediocre existence? This was mediocrity in its essence. A guy has a job, and he gets up in the morning, has breakfast, gets in his car, goes to work, does his job, gets in his car, comes home, spends time with his family, has dinner, reads the paper, goes to bed, and goes to sleep. And then he does that the next day, and then he goes to graduations, and then it goes to family reunions. In essence, he just behaves himself. just goes around behaving himself, you know, day after day. Just going down to work, saving money in the bank. Just remind me of back in grammar school. They said, you want to get good grades? Study five minutes every night for each subject and you will get good grade. And I went, right. And I never doubted any of these things. I never doubted that you could hold a job if you showed up every day. I didn't say, no, you can't. But even back at those very early days, I accepted that as the main road of life. But I said, there has to be alternatives to this, more exciting, more dynamic. I'm an adventuresome kind of a guy. Why would I want to go down a road that somebody's already mapped out? I want a chart new routes for the human race. I want to test the outer limits of life. I don't see the value in just going to work every day. What does that prove? Everybody knows if you go to work every day, if you do this, that it will turn out all right. So now we already know that, let's learn some new information. Can you never go to class at all and still graduate? You know what I mean? What about the outer limits of relationships? can you bring home a hat check girl and still stay married you know for some or other reason I always when everybody told me this is how it's done you know I bet a lot of you are like this as soon as they said chapter 5 how it works we immediately went I wonder what the alternative is you know what I mean I'm going to come up with a new angle. These people, I've been doing it 30 years, doing it this way. Wait till I get through with the 12 steps. Wait tillI get through with I'm always the kind of guy cutting out new ways of doing things. And I don't understand that. And now, it's taken AA to teach me the wonderful value of the middle of the road. I mean, how exciting it is there See, I thought that was dull I never had done it But like many of you I had this secret ability I could tell ahead of time what things were like Did anybody ever do that? They show you the 12 steps You read them and you go That wouldn't work for me How do you know? Oh, I can tell things like that without ever doing them I know... I just know things. See, I know myself real well. When you know yourself real well, like I do, you just know things like that. I can tell there's all that God stuff in there. Forget it. Never worked for me. Never, never, never. And then one of the old-timers goes, well, that's too bad because if it doesn't work for you, you're dead. Well, I mean, you know, I'm not saying it couldn't absolutely not work for me. I mean... What I was really saying is it probably wouldn't work for my son. Boy, what if they put that, you're dead, on there? That really gets you, you see. You know, it cuts out the maneuvering room and there's just no, hey, wait a minute. Whoops! And we're willing to change. And of course, change is the name of the game. Anyway, that was sort of my relationship with alcohol. I'm just trying to draw an analogy to a higher power. I had a lot of praying in the morning in front of the toilet and great singing and hymns. You wouldn't believe some of those great sound effects that went on in there in the mornings as I went through some strange religious ritual that the normal human race would never relate to. All of you understand? Yeah, oh yeah, sure, we all know that. But you go to the PTA, you might have a problem explaining the commode as a place of worship. But we certainly spent a lot of time in there and just, it was sort of the pain, the price you paid for the high class life that alcohol was giving me. And eventually alcohol, as it progressed, began causing problems that it alone could solve. The shakes and the excessive fears. In other words, now the cycle was building. I started out with enough problems. You know, I think I was a skinny teenage neurotic. I mean, I had nothing going before I started drinking. That's why I can get up here and say, I'm grateful I'm an alcoholic. Drinking didn't take anything away from me. I didn't have anything going before. I had, you know, and if I hadn't found Alcoholics Anonymous, I'd be an old skinny neurotic wandering around. Help, help, help. You know, I don't know what the hell's going on. And so I was lucky that alcohol came along and drove me in here where you forced me to deal with all kinds of terrible, painful situations in sobriety to eventually handle a lot of things without drinking. And so that's, oh, and then let me just say where I did my drinking. I ended up in the Marine Corps. I became a jet pilot, and I flew with them for 12 years, and then my drinking progressed so bad that I was shaking, could not barely fly. I mean, it was just the panic and the trembling hands and confusion and memory going and all of those loss of vision and heart palpitations and they've developed a sincere distrust of the pilot, which is me. I mean, it was just... There was me, the passenger, and then there was me the pilot. And you know, There was a great, great split going on there. So I did go see the doctors and they agreed there was a terrible problem and that very expensive airplanes were involved and that was the problem. So the crushing humility of losing my wings after 12 years of flying and all of the macho stuff that went with that Oh, God, that was the end of the world. And the decision of this Special Board of Flight Surgeons was that this problem was caused by a deep-seated childhood fear of airplanes and that I could be returned to duty full and fit as long as it didn't involve flying. So I was retrained as an air traffic controller and that was my job in the last year of my drinking was an air traffic controller and it was ridiculous I don't know how I got through that school with those hands shaking and the memory problems and all of that but somehow I got though it and that's what I was doing in my last year drinking but fortunately I was in charge of the unit and didn't do that much controlling and so I don' t have any horror stories to tell about that but the drinking got very bad Now I wasn't flying, so I drank during the day. And I got malnutrition, lost 50 pounds around the clock, vodka, and just absolute panic, sick. Just no, I just thought about suicide a lot, you know, the very ending to everything. And it was under those conditions that I ended up in the Bethesda Naval Hospital as a result of a convulsion and the DTs and all of those things. And it led me to this AA meeting. And subsequently, I got out and drank for about a day just to get even with that guy who told me about the blue bathrobe going up. And then that led to a phone call to get my sponsor. And I called Intergroup, and a monstrous guy arrived. There was another Marine, and he filled the doorway to my house. And he just said, hello, my name is Bill. This is a 12-step call. I talk. You listen. I just went, oh boy This was a mistake And there was a lot of My wife was there And she was You know, how much do you drink? Oh, a little bit And she's going, a Little bit He's been locked up in the night ward so he heard enough there and he just went well fine, fine okay get in the car and I'm going what the hell are you talking about you leave the literature and I am going to study about it get in a car and I remember and then I looked at this guy and he is like this and I was just shaking anyway so I got in the care I mean that's what I did I got into that damn car because I can spot two levels of pain and his looked like it would be higher than what I was experiencing at the time. And so I got in the car, and for the longest time I thought that was A.A.'s first step. Get in the Car! You know, just... And I'm glad for this guy. He's still in the Washington area, and I see him now and again. Our jobs keep us a little bit apart, But he was with me, and just every night for the longest time, he'd call up and tell me when he was picking me up. And we'd be off, and we went to meeting, meeting, meetings. And we were at the Marine base in Quantico, and the meetings were a good 45 minutes away. So we had a meeting on the way up and a meeting On the Way Back. And I just got so much AA, and that's what kept me going. And I went to a meeting almost every night for two years and got thrown out of the Marine Corps. And, oh, you want to see a guy with a resentment. Now I had about 14 years of service. I was a regular officer, you know, and now I'm going to a meeting every night and I've got a higher power than I'm starting to talk about a little bit. And then this happens. You know, you don't get promoted. It wasn't like a court-martial, I think. You just didn't get promoteed. It's called a Passover, and it's not a Jewish holiday or anything. It has to do with not getting promoted. And when that happens twice, you just disappear. You just are gone. And that happened to me, and now I have six kids. I don't know how to do anything. I don'T even know how TO EVEN GO ASK FOR A JOB. I MEAN, YOU KNOW, I'M JUST LIKE STARTING NEW OUT OF COLLEGE, AND I'M REAL NERVOUS ANYWAY. AND, OH, I'LL TELL YOU, I WAS RESENTFUL. And I couldn't understand it. I was sort of in a state of shock that this could happen. You know, you go to a meeting every night. What's this going-to-meeting-every-night stuff? And secretly, and I didn't talk about it that much in the meetings. I had learned a long time ago, if you have resentment, don't bring it up in the meeting. They'll get rid of it. Keep it at home. You can get that thing really going like a loaf of bread, you know. It'll keep rising and getting bigger and bigger. and I'd work on it in my room alone. And I, all right, God, do you think this is fair? And I was in about my third month of working on that one and was doing a wonderful job. It was so outrageously unfair what had happened. I kept track very carefully of unfair things when they occurred to me and just was devastated by this. And it was consuming. It was all-consuming, like resentments and self-pity are. There's nothing else that happens. You know what I mean? There's a big thunderstorm outside, and you go, oh, it's raining on my resentment. And, you know, it was one of the kids' birthdays, and I go, Oh, birthday cake on my sentiment. Everything's interfering with my resentment! I mean, there's nothing that happens when you have a good resentment going except your resentment. It's an all- consuming fire that's just getting bigger and bigger and is going to want something done about it. And, of course, vodka is very good on resentments. And there came a time, this is the strangest thing, when I was sitting in this room really having a conversation with God, very one-sided, you know, just explain it to me, will you? You know, how can you get off with this kind of stuff? Turned my life over and inventories, and oh, I was really given in the business about all these things. What about all these kids, you know? I can't find a job and now we're not under money. We're going to have to move out of this house. What about them? God, what have you got to say about it? You know, boy, really, you never get to go on like that when you're really giving part of your business there. Somewhere along there, I took a break and was scanning the Washington Post and back about page 10, a little damn article about that big, and it said, Marine Corps team killed in plane crash. And it caught my eye And I went down and looked, and God, it was the instruction team that I was assigned to. And every single guy that I worked with was dead. And if I had had my way and been promoted, I would be there. And I remember reading that, and there was the initial sense, oh, wow, this is an amazing thing. Then that passed, and then I was back, and it was me and God. And I felt kind of funny You know, it was almost like this I wonder if he saw me read back No, I haven't seen that You know It's just And I was caught I was in a very Very untenable position I think I mumbled like Well, if you told me Something like this Was going to happen and I wouldn't have been bitching about all these things and how unfair everything was. And, you know, life seems to unfold that way. What seems terrible today ends up being magnificent later on as we change our mind and are given more information about things, except when we're drinking, we never keep track of any of those things. Nothing ever falls into any sort of a sequence, so we never have anything but bad luck. And even when it was good, we weren't there to get it. The guy came to the door with a check, you know, knock, knock. And we're passed out inside. And we never got any of the news. Or if we did, we couldn't hear it. And so I'm sure we got our share, same as everybody else beforehand. It's just that we didn't know it. And, you know that happens so much in AA. We come to our area, and probably all of you, you came to your first meeting, you said, this is it. This is the worst thing that ever happened to me in my life. Three months later, he said, you want to know what the best thing is that ever happens to me in my lifetime? Getting forced into alcoholism. I thought that was the worst thing. Well, I changed my mind. I changed my mind on that. And if there's anything that I'd like to talk about in the minutes left, it is change. Change in my mind I think that's the purpose of the entire AA program is to get me self-centered, typical, intellectual type of guy who walks around with that feeling that he knows what's best for him. All those ideas I assembled growing up that was my philosophy of life and my opinion on this and to get me to consider changing that. That, I think, is the chore of Alcoholics Anonymous. And when I was riding out on the plane yesterday, I had plenty of time to read. That was the longest flight. It went all over the sky to get here. And there was a couple of articles in the American Airlines magazine. One of them was a long, long thing about Auschwitz. It just went on and on and On. And at the end of it, the author was talking about, you know, a situation like this could be used to explain the position that there is no God. And I can remember going, yeah, you know I really relate to that. And as I grew up, I collected information like that, that there was no God whenever I could find a little example to prove as far as I was, you knows, somebody would die in the family who was the most likely to succeed I thought, why that person? You know what I mean? How could a loving God do this? And then I would chalk that up to the truth that there was no loving God. And I remembered it brought back a lot of memories to me in reading that article about how I love to collect things to prove that there wasn't a God. I didn't know why I was doing it, but I enjoyed doing that because it helped defend my position, my drinking, my self-centered behavior and everything I was doing if there wasn't a God. I mean, see, then I could feel less guilty. Well, there isn't a god. There isn't any hope anyway, so why change? You know, why do any of these things? And it all hinged on there not being one. It was very crucial. That's why I come in day A. It was great. It was really threatening. There was God in all these steps, and you all were talking about him. And it just unglued everything that was holding my position together. And I found it very threatening in here. And that's when we talk about change and the pain and the fear of changing. I think that's part of it, is that we bring in a lot of this. But the other article that was in there was by Asimov, that science fiction writer, and it was about black holes in space. And that was very exciting. It was only about two pages long, but he was talking about the black hole, the matter that's in there is so dense that light can't escape from there. So I'm thinking about that. I'm going, light can't get out of there? I'm trying to imagine what it would be like if light can'T get out of there. And then he said, as a matter of fact, this theory goes back to when the whole universe may have been just one ball of matter which exploded and now the whole thing is going out and has been exploding on out there for billions of years. and everything, every single particle is changing. I mean, when I think about change, it's just billions of miles an hour in light and there's things where light came... Everything in the whole world is changing in the universe and then I look around here and the shadows on a lake and the temperatures and the wind is blowing. Now it's not blowing. Now there's a squirrel walking by. Now there're people... There isn't anything that's ever staying the same except me. You know what I mean? And the only way that that could possibly be possible is if you're in the exact center. And that's where I figured I was. In relation to everything, you know what I mean, I was right where the explosion took place. Billions and billions of years ago, and very little light was coming out of me. I'll tell you that right now. And I fit the description of a dark hole or a black hole where matter was so thick that light couldn't even get out of there. And I think about that, the absolute audacity of our self-centeredness to refuse to change and to come in here with convictions about things and to accuse people who do change of being wishy-washy. That was one of my... Excuse me, what are you, changing your mind all the time? What the hell's wrong with you? And this is the whole evidence of the universe is in change. And I suppose that I came here and I wondered where God was. Where would you ever find him? And I suppose all of you, one of the reasons you come back here is that it's so obvious where God is around here. You can just cast your eyes in any direction and just see the presence and feel it of God. It is just magnificent to look at it and the creations that exist in this lovely spot. And as I think about it, I had been taught something as a six-year-old that God indeed is everywhere. Everywhere that I care to look for it. I just chose to not do that. And I've thought a lot about it. And I'll wrap up by sharing why I think I didn't want to find God. Because I knew that if I was to acknowledge, were to acknowledge this existence of a higher power and was to admit that in fact If you were right, and I begrudgingly was wrong on this particular subject, that there was a great deal more changing that was going to be involved rather than that simple little statement. I was goingto have to change a whole lot of things. Like Ben was talking about this morning, I might have to stop stealing. I mean, there wasa great deal of inferences when you acknowledge the existence of a God. That meant there were such things as values. There were such thing as principles that people indeed loved each other, that I would have to change my mind about all of you and that the responsibility for all of my behavior would come back to me. And it was overpowering. I would no longer be able to blame the lack of a God or the lack love in other human beings. I would now have no more excuses for any problem that I had other than me and that was just overpowering oh my God I don't think I could live with that and I think that's what's unfolded a day at a time very gradually if we ever learn the truth about ourselves immediately we'd all blow our brains out and when we come in here it is revealed at a rate that we can stand it if you know what I mean and oh my god I can't believe it I just had a terrible example of it One of my daughters decided not to go to college, and then after a couple of years she changed her mind and started back. And I went through this whole routine about I don't think she's sincere. And, you know, once she's coming back now, she just found that the work life out there was tough. And she thinks coming back to college is going to be an easier, softer way. And I'm trying to give her a lesson about easier, softer ways and facing up and this and that. And I'll tell you, one of my other daughters after watching this for four or five months called me on the phone in my office. She said, I hate to do this, but I think the heart of this problem is you're just selfish. You'd want to keep the money for yourself and don't want to give it to her. And I went, oh. Oh. And it was almost like, how could I do that? How could I be, you know, sort of like a grown-up in ten areas of my life and then be like that in an area. It would be like if I had five bosses that I worked for and walked in and went, good morning, sir. Good morning, Sir. Good morning to the fifth one is it's so inconsistent with with the rest of our program. We have these little blind spots in our life where we're selfishness and greed or something gets a hook back in there and we don't see it coming. And we're not inventorying that. It just sneaks in. We're buying our own bullshit. You know what I mean? That sounds good to me. I'll teach her to grow up. Yeah. You know, sounds good. Keep it up, man. You can go on that vacation after all. You won't have to give that up. And there it was, you know. And then it hurt. And it hurts to grow up. My father asked me about two years ago what I wanted to be when I grew up. He used to ask me that every year and I never had an answer for him and I have one now. I want to be a grown-up. I have great respect for grown-ups. I really like them. They have values. They have sort of a sense of direction. Most of all, they have a God. I think that's my definition of a grown up. It's a person with a God, A person where they get direction from their God. And they rely on this as a sense of power. And they have humility enough to know that they're just a human being. And without a God, we're powerless. We're not just powerless over alcohol. We're just plain powerless. I shouldn't get on my case about that greed or something like that. I just forgot to bring God into that area. And now that I do, it's just like that's all fixed now. It wasn't that I had to go rethink it or anything. It just got fixed because I brought God into that area and he let all the pain out and let it go away and let me be free to do this. I don't have the power to forgive anybody. You're trying to forgive somebody? They did that to me. Okay, I forgive you. I mean, just saying the words means that you still judge them that they did wrong and you're going to be real big about it and forgive them. And, you know, we read in some of our literature what they talk about is prayer. When we go in and we try to pray to be less selfish because our selfishness and self-centeredness is what was hurt by this person's action. And if we can pray our self-centeredness down until it's that big, we suddenly realize there isn't anything that's hurting because that part that was hurt isn't there anymore. So we don't have to forgive anybody because there isn'T even an injury. And a problem just like our alcoholism was never solved. It was removed. Do you notice that? We never figured out why we're an alcoholic. We just forgot to have the problem anymore. We have a daily reprieve contingent on our spiritual condition. We don't go walking around fighting alcohol anymore. We just are going around and we go, You know, just like my crayon box that I lost when I was 12, I forgot to worry about it yesterday. You know, it just wasn't an issue. It didn't come up yesterday to be dealt with. I was sitting in my office and had a bunch of papers to work out. Never once, figuring those papers out, did I go, I wonder if there's a bottle of vodka in this drawer. Just never came into my mind. It was removed. And I think that's what happens on a spiritual level. It's a whole different realm of problem solving. And the problem is, in closing, is the type of help that's available, and I think we find this in our sixth step when it talks about we're entirely ready. The only type of health that's available is perfect health. Damn, that's the catch. There's no way to pray to be semi-honest. You know what I'm talking about? There's no... He doesn't help us there. You know what I mean? He only helps if you want to stay on the straight and narrow. It's the damnedest show I've ever seen. Then you get all the help you want. You want to go out and be useful and contribute and give and do all these wonderful things. You have an unliving supply of energy. You've made it exhausted when you come home from work. Phone rings and you're going to go on this thing. You'll be given the energy and you won't even be tired. You're out and you'RE doing it. But if you decide not to do that and grow up and have an affair or something, you're on your own. You've got to use your own strength and your own energy and your power and deal with your own guilt and cover up your own lies and handle everything yourself. There's no help available except down this damn middle. And what this is implying is perfection. And of course in chapter 5 it says we're not saints, we don't claim perfection. And I like that line, but that's not the only line that's been written about perfection in the AA literature. That says that's right, we don'T claim it because we're never going to get there, but we have to keep trying to get there. And that is what's involved in that sixth step, which is why in the 12 and 12 it says this is the one that separates the men from the boys, is that we would like to settle for as much perfection as would get us by. I'd like to give the impression that I'm honest because then people will do business with me. I don't want to really be honest. I just want to convey the idea that there's an honest man over there. Look at him. He has that look on his face. He has that smile, looks like an honest man. That's enough. I don't want to go overkill here. I don'T want to get better than people in my neighborhood and make them feel bad, right? How good should a person let themselves get? Right? You know, it's like when we sobered up in the bar, made the other guys feel uncomfortable. So when they talk about character building, getting lost in the dust of our chase after self-centered objectives in chapter, uh, in step six, this is what they're talking about. I go, character building? What about bowling? You know, why would character building have a value of its own? And we go, because we're involved in change. This is a dynamic program where we are never, ever going to be able to rest. We can rest on a daily basis. When we get up tomorrow, we're either going to grow or we're going to go backwards. And there's no way to just stop. And as we grow and ask for this higher power's help, we are truly growing towards whatever perfection we can learn. I learn from other people. I learn to see things from a higher perspective each year that goes by and each time that I'm able to share with you. And I'm confronted with the dilemma of grow or go, as they say. And that means it's going to be painful. And the final analysis in AA is coming to grips with the fact that life was intended to have a little pain in it. And I'm either going to use it to die or to live. I was looking for the third alternative, no pain. That was involved in drinking, but then that really was involving dying. So I really believe that this is a process of live, live, live until you die all the way to the end. There's no choice when I finally think about it. I was a person whose philosophy was, I want to keep all my options open. A person who keeps all their options open can't go anywhere. It's a standstill because as soon as you commit to go here, you aren't going in another 360 courses. And I found that what I had to do was to abandon that childish idea of keeping all my actions open and turn my life over to a higher power. Try and find out the way to live I never knew there was a right way to do anything. There was my way and then there was other things, but I found on a spiritual level there is a rightway of doing things. And I think in Alcoholics Anonymous, through each other's examples, we get glimpses of how situations might get handled, how life might be lived in the presence of a higher power, what real humility is, what giving is all about. And we see a little bit from this person and maybe I wake up in a spiritual mood one day and you don't. Maybe I can be helpful to you and then it's my turn the next day. I don't know what those days are. I wakeup, serenity prayer pissing me off. I want to read that damn thing, you know. Well, then I need one of you to come along and tell me life is great, man. Just keep coming. Just keep going. Keep coming back. And so we do do this together. We do it alone and we do it together. I love you all very much. It's just wonderful to be part of this. And we're part of something much bigger. And being part of something takes away all the pain of being everything. And I'm so grateful for it. Thank you. Applause God, thanks a million, Sandy. That was fantastic.