Step 7 and the 40 Percent of Page 76 – Don M.

Hi everybody, my name's Don Major and I'm an alcoholic. And I'm really grateful to be here. I got sober in Nashville where Mike and Diane are from and there were a lot of music people in the program down there and Chris gave me such a glowing introduction that I'm reminded of something that I remember hearing a long time ago in Nashville. In the music business, if somebody's ego is getting away with them, they say that he or she has gone to believing their advanced men. So I don't believe my advanced men, thank you. But thank you for that great introduction. And it's been a real pleasure to meet Chris and get to know him. I met his bride, and he's just been a super host in every regard. And I've gotten to bunk with him and my dear friend Gary over there. And Gary and I get to pass texts every day. And Mike has been in my home, and I've known and loved him and Diane for a while. and sweet Michael and Marsha over here who I just love so much. Michael has been misguided enough over the last year or so to actually ask for my input on some things and I'll have to say that I've told Michael this and it's true. Michael and Marsa have been one of the very nicest gifts that God has given me in the last years So I'm just so grateful to have you in my life. Camila's talk was just great last night. I don't think I've had the pleasure and honor of hearing her before, but what a way to kick off the conference. Even though John's not here, I understand he's at a wedding in Sioux Falls. I certainly appreciate everything that John's done and that everybody has done to put this conference together. It's got a great spirit, and I'm just so grateful to be part of it. And, you know, I'm sitting there thinking, which we have been in trouble when that happens, by the way. Let me tell you first that my sobriety date is April 9th of 1981. And my home group is the Calm Down Group, which meets across the river from downtown Louisville, Kentucky. And 30 years ago, a couple of other fellows and I started that group, and I named it. It meets on Wednesday, and back then by Wednesday I really needed to calm down. It meets at 530 on Wednesdays, and if you're ever in Louisville, give me a buzz and I'll take you to the calm down with me. I'd love to have you. And my sponsor is Bob B. from St. Paul, Minnesota, who's been my dear friend for many years and my sponsor for the last roughly year. Bob and I have a very complex relationship. About six weeks ago, Bob came to Louisville and asked a fellow by the name of Tim H. to be his sponsor. Well, his problem is, I'm Tim's sponsor. So Bob is now my sponsor and my grand sponsee. tim is my sponsee and my grand sponsor and i try not to think about it it's just too much but uh i thought about the theme of the conference uh that spiritual principles will solve all of my problems that is exactly right in my case um one thing i will say came to my mind, knowing spiritual principles didn't solve any of my problems. Giving lip service to spiritual principles and intellectualizing them didn't solve a single problem. You know, the wording of the big book to me is just, it has to be divinely inspired because it's worded just exactly right. You it says that the spiritual life is not a theory. We have to live it. So spirituality or the spirituality that matters, now me feeling all spiritual and everything, that makes me feel good. But that's what I've been about all my life, making me feel Good. It doesn't have any other impact on anything. The spirituality that Matters is the spirituality that I do. and that matters regardless of how I'm feeling. One of the greatest things, in fact maybe the single greatest thing that I have realized, that has become real to me and I love the word realize. I had thought until after I got sober that I had just taken for granted that to realize something and to know something were synonymous. You know, I know that. I realize that. But truth is realized is a form of the word real. Once I've realized something, that means that it's become real inside me. And there are things to this day that I've known for 60 years that I have not realized, that have not become real inside me. And the thing that has been so important to me is the realization that I don't have to be a slave to the old crazy picture show in the back of my head. I had thought all my life that the most important thing in the world, and it was the most important thing to me, was what I thought, felt, and believed. And if I didn't feel like doing right, it does not in nature occur to me to go ahead and do right what I'm going to do is find some way to fix me so I feel like doing right well I was convinced all my life that the difference between good people and me was that they felt like doing right and if we could get me fixed so I felt like doing right, I could be good people too. But I've known for decades now those good people and they were good people may not have felt a bit more like doing write than I did. They may have been grumbling under their breath. They may Have been resentful as they could be about doing it. They may had mixed motives for doing it but they did right and that made them good people and I did not and that made me bad people despite all my lofty intentions and all my rationalizations you see what I've learned is that in 75 years on this earth those thoughts, feelings and beliefs that I think are so critical are really a will-o'-the-wisp. They have no substance, and they have never one time left a footprint on reality. Never once. During all the damage that I did to the people around me and everything around me and myself in my drinking career, what I thought, felt, and believed didn't hurt a soul. It was what I did and what I failed to do. Now, if I turn my behavior over it, to my thoughts, feelings, and beliefs, and allow it to dictate my behavior. The behavior leaves one heck of a footprint on reality. But the freedom is knowing that I can be crazy, and if I don't act crazy, it won't hurt anything. You know, it no longer bothers me a lot when I'm crazy, as long as I just don't acting crazy. I was in the asylum 18 times for alcoholism and related disorders, Michael refers to them as party favors, in two and a half years. And before I ran out of money and got my law license jerked and was living on the street and had to go into the joints where you ate the same food as the jail and you had to get on food stamps before you went in. I was in a really nice joint in Mobile, Alabama, Southland Psychiatric Hospital. I was there 42 days. The day they let me out, they took me to the bus station. I didn't have any clothes, so my counselor was a lady by the name of Hattie, and HattIE had a brother-in-law that was only about four or five inches taller than I am, and he had a red and blue plaid suit that he didn't want anymore. So Hattcie had brought me my red and Blue plaid suits that were four or five inches too long, and she drove me to Greyhound Bus Station and to send me over to my sister's in Panama City Beach. So Hattie and I hugged and cried after 42 days of bonding. They'd given me a jug of those little blue 10-milligram volumes, again, that Michael mentioned, and I stood there with tears streaming down and waved goodbye to Hatties. Soon as she turned the corner, I went to the liquor store and got two pints of vodka, and they had to carry me off the bus when I got to Panama City. But I got a lot out of the 42 days, and this is what I got out of it. i've never been able to remember whether it was a staff member or another inmate but somebody told me while i was there they said don they don't put you in the asylum for being crazy and i said well they put me in here for being crazy and they said no they didn't they put you in here for acting crazy. And they will not let you out of the asylum for being sane. They will let you outof the asylumfor acting sane. And even though I was a year from getting sober, that stuck with me. And that's been of huge value to me over the years and you folks have just been treated to the only talk I've ever started that way. So, excuse my voice I've got a hoarseness that they tell me is acid reflux but having been blessed with four years ago this month being diagnosed with stage four throat cancer I'm mighty glad to be up here and be able to make an intelligible sound so thank you God and thank you folks for bearing with my hoarsiness but at any rate we're going to need some help and you're going need it probably more than I am over the next few minutes. I call it divine intervention. Now, if you're like I was when I got here and you're intellectually offended by some old fool up here going on about divine intervention, not only do I understand you in my old seat, so I understand fully, and I have a suggestion for you. When I talk about divine intervention. Just substitute the magic from the steps. It'll get you to the same place for now, and it won't insult your sensitive intellect so terribly. But by any other name, the first help I've got to have is something has to get me out of the way, and it will not be me. I'm not a bit more capable of getting me out the way tonight than I was in April of 1981. It's just way too big a job for me. I have to have God to do that. And the next thing I think of is I'm going to try to follow directions, and believe me, I have a long and sad history with the directions. They have never applied to me. They have not met my expectations. They have ever meant what they say. And see, I need to tell you all that I have a deeper understanding thing of things than ordinary people. In fact, at times I'm wounded by my own understanding, you see. that's supposed to be funny nobody's laughing but at any rate I have an understanding of things for instance I've always understood who's responsible for making the directions it's really nerds you know just conservative square john nerds and they're usually being advised by insurance lawyers who are worse than they are and I've almost always understood the target audience of the directions. It's morons, just stone idiots. So obviously these nerds are overstating everything to manipulate these morons into doing things. And since my case has always been different and special, I have to sort of extrapolate to figure out what the directions might really mean because they don't mean what it's saying. And I assure you if I haven't done the work I need to do today to maintain my spiritual condition on Saturday and get my daily reprieve I am just as susceptible to misreading the directions as I ever was. And by the way if I've learned anything in a few years around here sober I've earned that I don't get much divine intervention on Saturday based on what I did on Friday. It's truly a one-day-at-a-time thing to get my help, but if I haven't done what I need to do, if I were to see some directions that said something like do not exceed four in 24 hours, my brain may actually register that as something like Do Not Exceed 24 in 24 Hours, and I'm going to try to follow the simple directions that we hear with how it works, a little bit about what I was like and what happened and what I'm like now. And there's another set of directions in the book that we don't talk about as much, but it's really precious to me they are. It says words to the effect that our personal language tells us or our personal stories tell in our own language and from our own point of view how we've been able to form a relationship with our creator. And I really hope my story carries that. my history in that regard is problematic I didn't start telling this from the podium until a year ago because it sounds unbelievable but I grew up on a tobacco farm southwestern Kentucky on the Tennessee line there was a Baptist church Locust Grove Baptist Church twenty and a half mile to mile down the road from that farm And I was sitting in there around Christmastime when I was four years old, and I have a distinct memory of still believing in Santa Claus and absolutely rejecting everything that preacher was saying. Now where that insanity came from, I don't know. And I don' t know whether we were born alcoholics or not. but I'll tell you one more thing about my early life and you can judge whether I may have been a little off the first day of the second grade when I was six years old I went straight into the office of the principal Miss Fanny Wallace and said Miss Fannie I have been in a car wreck over the summer and have brain damage and can't be expected to do as well this year she laughed about that the rest of her life but at any rate um with god's help we'll proceed a little bit my childhood and early life used to be a really romantic and saga and an interesting saga and i believed it to the point i'd have us both crying before i got done telling it and and it was all about how by my iron will and my sterling intellect I had pulled myself up by the bootstraps from the depths of poverty to those staggering heights I'd reached in life. I don't think I was sober a week until I realized, man, what a load of baloney. We weren't even poor. We weren'T anywhere close to poor. We were middle-class farming people who had everything we needed and most of the things we wanted. The fact is we were better off than anybody else in the whole community there. but I believe that with all my heart and of course the staggering heights were a good deal more staggering than they were high my alcoholism is a many-splendored thing one thing it is, is a disease of superlatives which means that without divine intervention I won't think about things like good and bad an ordinary will never cross my mind I'll go directly to the extremes best, worst truth is, drunk and sober I've been a lot more ordinary than my ego's ever been comfortable with. But at any rate, what was really going on the first 12, 13 years of my life is what the big book calls or talks about selfishness and self-centeredness being the root of our troubles. And what I've said for decades is my ego disorder that I've had all my life it's been front and center in my life every day of my life drunk and sober and on account of that ego disorder without divine intervention i am so obsessed with myself i'm so obsessed with how i believe i stack up against other people i'm så obsessed with how i feel that i believe at the very core of my alcoholism along with that ego disorder is this, without divine intervention I will always wind up letting how I feel be the most important thing in the world. Now without divine prevention I can give some lip service to things being more important and I might be able to act for just a little while but if I haven't done what I need to do today when the ships get down I'll go back to my default position and my default position is to let how I feel be the most important thing in this universe. And all that obsession with myself had the only impact I think it can have on a human being. It created so much pain and emptiness and difference and apartness down inside me, and most of us have a story like that. I remember Mike describing his feelings this morning. But I couldn't be okay with anything or anybody on the face of this earth. I had, and I still today, have no peers without divine intervention. You see, my ego disorder makes me an egomaniac with an inferiority complex. And what I mean by that is I'm perfectly capable of feeling too good for something or somebody and at the same instant knowing I'm not nearly good enough for that same person or that same thing. All my life I've known I could do anything. At the same time, I've known I couldn't really do anything. So that's what I brought to my first drunk. That mess. Just a totally self- obsessed kid trying to stay half a step ahead of screaming fit. I was 12 or 13 when I got drunk the first time. I got in a world of trouble. I puked. I blacked out. I passed out. Woke up the next morning had a terrible hangover swore all those Baptists around there were right about that and that I would never ever touch that stuff again and not only was I sincere it was fairly effective because it was nearly a week until I got drunk the second time and I got drunk for the second time after all the problems with the first one for exactly the same reason that I got drunk the other few thousand or several thousand times. The miracle had happened, and most of us have some version of that story. Of course I didn't know it was the miracle. I woke up next morning with the four horsemen in full regalia already surrounding me. I thought I was dying. I was the fear, the terror, the remorse, so physically sick that I'd never been that sick in my life. When I was a year and a half, I ate one of my daddy's, that's my first memory, I ate on of my dad's camel cigarette butts. I was sicker than that. So I didn't know a miracle had happened. What I did know was that for a few minutes on my way to Pukin and so on, I had passed through a right pleasant neighborhood. But of course it was magic because when I got enough booze in me for the first time in my whole life, I found something that made me feel good enough inside that I could stand it without either running as hard as I could and or trying to stuff anything something in there to try to make me feel Good Enough that I can stand it so for the next 25 years alcohol, not just alcoholism alcohol dominated everything in my life and my powerlessness over alcohol is no mystery to me at all. Since I didn't know there was anything but the alcohol and in the latter years, the things like it that could do that trick for me, make me feel good enough inside that I could stand it without running or trying to scramble around for anything else. When I wanted to change the way I felt badly enough, remember that the way you feel I feel without divine intervention is the most important thing on earth to me. And believe me, for that 25 years, I wasn't interested in any divine intervention, thank you. So the bottom line was really simple. It didn't matter what it cost and it didn't matter who it cost because as far as I knew they were the only games in town to the most important thing in this universe to me, the way I felt. I'm not going to give you a drunk log. My friends that have heard me before have heard it and we've all heard a bunch of drunk logs but I do want to let you know that I did not wake up one day and decided that I'd like to seek a spiritual life and that alcohol started to give me the hiccups. For many years over 20 years I operated based on results at a really high level for a wildly practicing alcoholic. The 25 years that I drank way more than 80% of the 24 hour periods I was drunk somewhere during that period. I had no idea I was drunk that often because the only standard or criterion I ever had for whether I was drunk was whether or not I blacked out. If I remembered everything that discussion was over. I was not drunk. In Kentucky where I've lived all my life with the exception of a couple to three years in Nashville hitting bottom and staying sober the first little bit But Kentucky's got the blood alcohol limit down to .008 now. I probably woke up drunk 80% of the mornings, but the reason that I seemed to accomplish things was two reasons. One was God blessed me with really an extraordinary academic gift. The other one was that I had no ambition. I had terror, but I had tower and abundance. It wasn't ambition that made me lay there on those thousands of mornings, dying a thousand deaths, with the night coming back to me in little flashes, being propelled out of the bed by terror after four or five cigarettes, thinking about things that I'd done last night and their consequences, thinking about the things I was terrified of facing that day, going in sticking a toothbrush in my mouth, throwing up half the mornings of my life for 25 years. I didn't even know that was abnormal. It started about the time I reached puberty, and I vaguely associated it with puberty. You know, you don't discuss that. You don't go to a cocktail party and say, Hi, sweetie, did you puke when you brushed your teeth this morning? You just can't take it for granted. I haven't thrown up when I've brushed my teeth in over 38 years. It's amazing. But what propelled me was terror. It was terror that if I didn't get up and try to put on the right clothes and go where I was supposed to go and make the right noise, you would see what I was and what I wasn't, and I'd have to look at it. And a part of me felt like that if i had to look at what Iwas and what i wasn't it would be like the earth would swallow me up through that emptiness in my own middle. I just couldn't let that happen. So that worked for 20 years. Nobody ever had to tell me that drinking in the morning would cure hangover. I was born knowing that in the marrow of my bones. The reason I didn't start drinking immediately when I came to was that terror. And somewhere around 20 years of drinking, those scales tipped just a little bit. And that physical allergy to alcohol, that phenomenon of craving, the physical addiction to ethanol and alcohol became stronger than the terror. And then it was all over. I had been an early admission student in college with an academic scholarship. I wound up blowing that the first year because I stayed so drunk, I lost all concept of day and night. That started when I was 16. I just passed out and came to. So then for seven and a half years, I worked full-time, went to school full-term, drank full-tim, and somehow got through undergraduate in law school with good grades, and I have no idea how that happened. Looking back on the whole eight years, I don't have a handful of clear memories. It was just a swirling gray mass of alcoholic insanity. Spring of 68, graduated from law school, started practicing law when I passed the bar that summer. My daughter Dana, who was my only child for over 20 years, was born. And I had 10 years of running just as hard as I could practicing law. I've been a criminal defense lawyer ever since I got out of law school. I've Been a self-employed private criminal defense lawyer. I had quite a bit of material success that first ten years. Not as much as I used to think I had had. That's the peculiarity about staying sober. We get a better focus on our past. They tell us out here in the world that you can't change the past. Don't believe that crap. We do it in here every day, but I've always had a knack for getting involved with some cases that had money in them and sometimes publicity, and that's what I'd stick in your face when you suggested there was something wrong with someone who lived as insanely as I did. My conservative estimate is at least a third of the days of that 10 years or nights I did not take off my clothes and attempt to go to bed like a human being. I either passed out in some other circumstances or changed the combination of things I was put in my body and tried to go ahead and fly through court the next day without ever laying my head down it got worse than it was before it got worst because alcoholism simply progresses in everybody that's ever had it it got wors because I no longer had a boss nobody had anybody looking over my shoulders it got wor because I had money to escalate it with and during the latter part of that 10 years I used a world of things other than the booze. But before you get your singleness of purpose knickers all in a knot, let me clarify that. My story is exactly the same as Bill and Bob's, exactly the same. What I used was different and I probably used a lot more of it, but it's the same story. Everything I ever used was a sideshow and the boozed was the big tent. Everything else was something to have an impact on the booze, change the effect, increase the effect decrease the effect help me try to function on the hangovers but it all went back to the boozes that's where it was and that's what I am is I am an alcoholic. There ain't a number of 12-step programs and fellowships that I could send up and say hello my name is Don and am I because I am all those other things but what I am first foremost and always is I am an alcoholic. But at any rate February 10th of 1978 I'd been sober or been practicing law about 10 years. I sure hadn't been sober and I got full of well it was scotch, cocaine, quaaludes, speed and vodka. And I drove Corvette off interstate there in southwestern Kentucky at over 120 miles an hour. Did an awful lot of horrible things to my body. I lost most of the main artery in one lower leg. They had to do a bypass in the upper leg and take out a vein grafted in to replace the artery. It separated my pelvis and pulled my internal plumbing in two, so I didn't have a urinary function for over a year. I had what they call a suprapubic catheter, where they bore a hole in your abdomen and pop that in to carry your urine out to a bag. I'd had a half dozen major surgeries the first year after that wreck, and I was in hospitals more than six months of the first years. The doctors told me early on that I would never walk again without at least a brace on one of my legs and maybe both. And they told me that they were absolutely positive, that we'd never find a surgeon who would attempt to put my plumbing back together so that I would ever have a normal urinary function. It turns out they were wrong. I've been sober 38 years and have owned a brace for over 38 years. And about a year after the wreck, the head of urology Duke University did put my plumbing back together, but I didn't know that happened. When I finally got able to have visitors, and we're talking about six to eight weeks, it was two and a half months before they stood me upright on the tilt table for the first time. I'm laying in the hospital with that prognosis. And once I could have visitors every single day to my recollection, my friends would come in and bring me booze and more dope than the doctors were giving me and I would lie in that hospital bed and say really intelligent things I would say things like you know fellows remember my prognosis never walking without a brace never pinion I'd say fellows anybody can stop drinking when the going gets a little tough but it takes a man to lay in there with it when the bills start coming in and then I might explain to them that a man ought not be out there doing the crime if he's not prepared to do the time. So they're not going to hear me whining, give me a drink, let's go on with it. That's insanity. And that is powerlessness. And when you really think about it, it's letting the way I felt in that instant and my desire to change it be the most important thing in the universe. Letting it be more important than my child letting it be more important than my profession more important than whether I ever walked more important than whether I ever peed more important than whether I lived or died and I've been convinced for a long time that when one of us after we know what we are picks up that first one and puts it in us It is the most self-centered act on the face of this earth, this side of suicide. Because it's a conscious decision that we are letting the way we feel and our desire to change it be more important than God, be more importante than a family, anything. Responsibility, letting the ways we feel in that moment be the most important thing in the world. Well, I've lost everything. I'd had a young lady with me when I had that wreck who was not my daughter's mother she was hurt badly but not as badly as I was because she had on a seatbelt and at the time of the wreck I was remarried to my daughter now I'm not proud of any of the insanity of that area of my life before I got sober and actually the first nine years that I was sober The best way to describe it would be it was like a fight in a brothel. And I'm sorry for all the people that I hurt, and I've done the best I can to make amends, and I continue to live and make amens. But I'm not going to fail to laugh at myself where I have been ridiculous. So I'll give you my one sociological observation of the evening. It's not in the big book. Feel free to ignore it. But over the years, I've just looked around and observed, and I've concluded that the fact that I was remarried to the same woman establishes my alcoholism without further authentication. I just don't believe a normie would do that. If they even considered jumping right back in a frying pan they just got out of, they'd tear the door off the asylum getting in to protect themselves. And we do it routinely drunk and sober, you know. Drawing through a divorce, but they'll date and they'll probably get back together. And it works for us sometimes. It's not necessarily bad. Really different from ordinary folks. But at any rate, obviously I got a brand new divorce right after the wreck. And I wound up married to that young lady during that period. She had to leave me on account of insanity. My 18th asylum. And she was staying with some girlfriends who died in an accident. And I last laid eyes on my only child, Dana, in January of 1980. I didn't see or have any contact with Dana for over three years. A law firm of nine or ten lawyers had built up around this other guy and myself. We had founded it. And they had to kick me out on account of the social and legal pressure that my behavior brought on them. And I'm so grateful for that because I wasn't going to make the decision at his bottom. And if you're new, please don't wait for bottom to happen. I've seen hundreds and hundreds of people die waiting for bottom to happen to you. I don't think bottom happens to us nearly as much as bottom is a decision over which we have all the control on earth. We don't have to feel like we've hit bottom to get sober, but we certainly have to act and behave like we have hit bottom if we're going to get and stay sober. But at any rate, I'm so grateful for that because I wasn't going to make that decision as long as I had a Timex watch. I certainly wasn't gonna make it as longas I had law firm. Right after the guys kicked me out of the law firm and stayed in Kentucky, jerked my law license. I wound up living without an address for almost a year. Wound up in Nashville, Tennessee at the asylum number 17. I usually call it the Pentultimate Asylum. At least I hope it proves to remain that. I stayed in there a little over 30 days and time for me to get out. I had no home. I had not a job. I had nothing to do. I had nowhere to go. I had my car. I had none of my clothes. My teeth were rotting out of my head. No place to go, no way to get there. And I had a roommate there at Cumberland Heights, was the name of that one, who was a really young guy. Of course, I was ancient. I would have been 36 at that time. And his family lived in Nashville, Bellevue. And those sweet folks weren't even really involved in AA. You know, we don't have a monopoly on spirituality. My sweet wife, Sharon, doesn't need to be in the program, never knew me when I was drinking. and that lady wakes up more spiritual than I can get after two hours of prayer, meditation and intensive work with another alcoholic and yet sometimes I have to bite my tongue to keep from saying something along the lines of well honey what do you know about spirituality you're not even an alcoholic for God's sake flash of truth guys I think in December 1934 A loving God, through Bill Wilson, took pity on a bunch of spiritual retardees and put the wonderful spirituality that people have been enjoying for millennia in such a simple form that even we could grab hold of enough of it to live normally and have a decent life. But at any rate, that's just an unsigned. Those folks felt sorry for me and said, come stay with us a few days and let's try to figure out what to do with you. I wouldn't live with them a year. First six months I didn't stay straight, but it got better. Got to where sometimes I could go. I went to a world of meetings at a clubhouse there, a friendship house that everybody calls the 202. and I got to where sometimes I could go two or three weeks without getting ripped and that was a world record for me and how I really know I got better is they only put me back in the fourth floor of St. Thomas Hospital a rubber room one time in that entire six month period and the rate I'd been going twice a year in the asylum looked like the picture of mental health and late March of 81 I got on my most recent drunk and it was another one of my pop off vodka slash Listerine drunks and I honestly have drunk buckets of both those things and this is not a joke I have better memories of the Listerines I can stand to smell ListerINE today but I can't stand to smell that old hot cheap vodka but on this most recent drink I was drinking, taking everything. I'd get my hands home. And April 8th, I'd been drunk 10 days or two weeks later. That's the most recent day I drank. And I'm sitting on the edge of a motel in Nashville. And that's when the loving God that I'd never asked for a single thing that I didn't believe was there, that I wanted nothing to do with, gave me the most wonderful, life-saving, and life-staining gift that I've ever had or I will ever have. And it is that loving, sustaining, life staining, sustaining gift that is the only reason on this earth that I'm out here speaking at this roundup to you sweet folks instead of having been rotting in a pauper's grave somewhere around Nashville for over 38 years. And what that gift was is kind of hard to put into words. My mind didn't change about a thing. I only realized retrospectively that I had the gift. Nothing had changed. My thoughts, feelings, and beliefs were still the same. I didn't have an epiphany. Ah, you know, I've seen the truth. I found out those don't do you better good if you don't doing something about them. I've had about a thousand burning up smoking bushes where I see them oh my god that's an epiphany that's life-changing don't do anything about it two weeks later I don't even remember but a couple times I've done what Bill did with that flash of light in that hospital room I've gotten out my bellows and started giving that smoking bush some air I've started talking about it like it might be a burning bush most important of all I have begun behaving as if it might be a burning bush and those have burst into flames and if Bill had done, and he didn't know what it was and Dr. Silkworth didn't either Dr. silkworth's exact words the next morning is I remember I don't know what it is it was either Bill but if I were you I'd hold on to it it's got to be better than what you had and Bill got out his bellows and he, oops now for my next trick I will. But Bill got out his bells and started treating that like it might be a burning bush, and it burst into flames, and that's why we're here. So the reason I'm telling you that is I've learned that I am part and parcel of my own burning bushes. I have to behave appropriately for my smoking bushes to amount to a thing. This deal's not about learning. This deal is about doing. But at any rate, I didn't have any idea anything was different. I had the same insane mixture of pitiful and incomprehensible demoralization and egomania. But for one reason or another, interchangeably, AA couldn't work for me. i went stumbling by that time once something prized me loose from alcohol took three or four days for me to be able to do something physically like sit up in a chair well four or five days after that most recent drink i stumbled back to the door of the 202 club didn't think they'd let me in and in today's world they would not i had passed out in their aa meetings and had to be bodily carried out. They'd caught me in their men's room with illegal outside issues. They had warned the people they sponsored to stay away from me, that I was a loser and I was going to die about two months before I got sober and I think this is the same Joe that Mike was talking about, Joe Wall yeah, Joe's been dead several years so we can use his last name wherever we want to but But I was walking through the 202 Club, and Joe was about 6'5", 6'6", and he walked up and looked way down at me and said, Don, I'm beginning to think you really are too intelligent for this program. And I thought he was giving me a compliment. My knee-jerk reaction was, well, thank God they finally figured out who they're dealing with. But Joe went on, and it may very well have been a turning point, even though I didn't get sober for a couple of months later. And what he said was, that's a real shame, Don, because we have never had anybody too dumb for this deal and we bury you buttholes all the time. And that felt like an icy hand closing over something inside me. And thank my loving God, that icy hand's never completely gone away. You let me take a couple stitches off the right path, I'll feel the tips of those fingers. And to date it's jerked me right back. But at any rate, they did let me in to my surprise. I remember who did it. Harry B., the clothing man, said, come on in, Don. You're keeping us sober. So I went and said, well, you guys tell me one more time what I need to do if I want to live. And they said, sure. Don't drink. Don't take. Go to meetings. By the grace of God, having no idea why I was doing it, the first 60 days I went to over 150 meetings to the best of my recollection I didn't want to go to one of them it was still totally clear to me that you all were religious fanatics and it was absolutely clear that your silly little program and your myth of a higher power couldn't take care of my complex and unique problems but I've been given a gift of being able to turn around to my brain and say yeah I know but we just, we've burned everything up, partner. We don't have any options. We're just going to go. And thank my loving God. I had the same thing backwards about that, that without divine intervention, I've had backwards every day of my life and I've already mentioned it. I make it all about what I think, feel, and believe. You see, I thought in order for AA to work, I had to first believe it would work. And then I thought it had to feel like it was working while it was looking. And I think I thought I had to be able to see the causal relationship of A causing B. Turned out none of that had anything to do with it. All I needed to do was get my raggedy butt to meeting after meeting and let my old sick brain and soul get dragged in there kicking and screaming behind the raggedly butt. Then they told me if I wanted to live, I was going to have to read the big book. And I said, I've read it a few times. And they said, we know. You've been quoting it to us while you've been dying. they said the first thing you need to get straight is this is not a philosophy book there's nothing in this book you can learn or master that will somehow transport you to a state of sobriety they said don't believe this crap about recovery being a learning process they said you got to learn about that much and they said Don in your case you have had enough information about AA and recovery for over two years to stay sober a day at a time the rest of your life without learning one single new piece of information. They said tell me what's killing you in what you know and don't know it's what you're doing and not doing and they said what this book really is is a simple instruction manual for your actions and they say if you want live you better come back to it and say that set aside prayer everything you think you know about god or in my case the absence of god the book your alcoholism alcoholism me and they said you need to start at the front cover and go through it line for line reading only the black part not interpreting distinguishing memorizing or arguing with anything not looking for anything to learn but for what it says do and then if you won't live you'd better do it and then they explained to me that the 12 steps, the action that's the first nine steps to bring us to a state of recovery and smash our ego and bring us through a state of discovery. By the way, my original sponsor, Jerry Carpenter, explained that to me, and he explained that if I did the work as the book says do it, my ego would indeed be smashed at the end of that, and I would be in state of recovery and I'll go to my grave having no idea why cherry chose the time period eight seconds but he said Don in your case I suspect that condition to last about eight seconds after you completed the first nine steps and then if you want to give live the rest of your life you're going to have to do you know our content our daily reprieve is not contingent on our spiritual condition and thank God because I have no immediate power over my spiritual condition if it's contingent on that I'm a sitting duck on those days when I feel cut off from God and you when I don't want to get on my knees when I do get on the weeds when it doesn't sound right when I'm so scared or worried I can't remember the last word I just tried to pray when the second to last thing I wanted to be is get on My Knees and Pray and the last thing I want to do is talk to a sponsee. If it were contingent on my spiritual condition, I'd be setting it up. But it's not. Not what the ink on the paper says. It's contingent on the maintenance of my spiritual conditioning. And that's the difference in these lights being on and off. Because you see, the maintenance of my spiritual condition is all action over which I have 100% control. And I have a textbook that tells me precisely what action to take so it changed immediately that realization it changed my daily reprieve from something beyond my immediate control to something totally within my immediate control but at any rate they explain that if i've got an infection that's going to kill me but it will respond to penicillin that I don't need to understand the nature and origin of my infection, and I don'T need to aggravate the medical profession, the people around me talking about that. The truth is I could learn everything there is to know about that infection, and if I DON'T take the pills, I'M DEAD MEAT. I DONT NEED TO UNDERSTAND HOW PENICILLIN WORKS in the human body. I don't need to believe that that little bottle of pills can take care of all these terrible things wrong with me, can take care of it. And most important to me, they said you don't want to want to take the pills. Whether or not you want to take pills is irrelevant. If you take them as directed, you'll get just fine. And they said, we guarantee you that the action that is the first nine steps to get to recovery and the action that's 10, 11, and 12 to stay there will work on alcoholism exactly that way. And the fact that I'm here is proof that they were right. And I've seen that miracle happen in hundreds of lives over the last 38 years. I've got a few more minutes here to talk about real quickly. The other thing they told me was I had to get on my knees morning and night. My brain said, of course I can't do that. Sometime in late April, I started against my brain's loud, over my brain'S loud veto, embarrassed even though I was by myself, getting on my knee's, talking to the wall, asking something I did not believe was there, to do something I didn't believe could be done. and not knowing why I was doing it, I kept on doing it. And I could count the mornings or nights I missed since April of 81 on my fingers. Many times I haven't wanted to get down there. Many times it hadn't felt right. But I've gotten down there and something's worked every single day. But at any rate, they led me through the steps in Nashville through the first nine steps to mass shock. I lived there 21 months sober. unemployed, unemployable, happier than I'd ever been in my life. I didn't want a law license back. I assumed I could never get one. My departure from the bar had been very ugly and very public, front page of the paper, public, you know, very bad black eye on the bar. But at a year-and-a-half sober as a pure bipartite of steps eight and nine, my law license got put back in order. 21 months over, January 83, I go back to Louisville scared to death. If I could have gotten a minimum wage job in Nashville, I'd still been in Nashville. But I had no choice. I had to go back. And God's miracles started taking over there. Second month I was in town, February 83, they stuck me up in front of 2,000 people to talk. People started asking me to sponsor them, to speak all over the country. That same month, I saw my child, Dana, for the first time in over three years. Two months later, she moved in with me, lived with me throughout her high school years. And Dana and I are in daily touch and love one another greatly. Beautiful relationship. My law practice started doing well, and by the time I was nine years sober, I was sponsoring 2,500 people had been speaking all over the country for years and years and relationships with the women and financial chaos was about to kill me and some things happened that I began to realize that I had totally missed what six and seven were see I'd done my fourth step and then my fifth step formed a picture of what a spiritual dawn ought to be like and I had gone home to my attic I'd gotten my own attic by then and I'd spent an hour with the first five steps decided I'd done okay got on my knees said that seventh step prayer with the 40% of page 76 that's devoted to it and six and seven have been the most important steps in my life every day for over 29 years now you see, I thought that it was where, with God's help, I went to work on me to make me in what I had decided a spiritual Don would be when I did my fourth and fifth step. And until I was nine years sober, I thought that was the only responsible way to do it. Turns out I had it all wrong. You know, I have trouble reading the big book. And the reason I do is I already know what it says. It's a great exercise to read those things. great spiritual exercise it has great value but when you're flipping through then your brain's going got it got it good spiritual discipline but you're not going to learn anything but every once in a while God will give me the grace to see what the ink on the paper says instead of what I thought it said and of course that seventh step prayer doesn't ask God to remove all my defects of character it doesn't asked God to move the ones that are making myself self-centered, but uncomfortable and embarrassed. And it doesn't ask God to remove the ones that are inconsistent with my self-determined objective of what I thought a spiritual God ought to be. I began to realize that my problem with perfection is far deeper and different than I thought it was. I thought my problem mit perfection is my inability to attain it, and I certainly am unable. But that never matters. My problem with perfection is my inability to recognize it. I wouldn't know perfection if it came right through here on a motor scooter. If Don said, Don, you've been sober 38 years, you're 75, tell me just exactly who and what you ought to be and I'll accommodate. I'd have no idea. No idea whatever. And it turned out it's not where I went to work on me with God's help. It's where I accept that I can't effectively work on any of their character defects any better than I could work on alcohol. I've got to come back to my God like a third step on steroids and say, Mom, Dad, I don't know where we are. I don' t know how we got here. I don''t know where are we going. But I'm going to at least behave like A person who accepts that they cannot comprehend the patterns of their life. And I'm going to listen to that divine spark, that little bit of you that's in every human being that never ever tells me the next stitch after the next one, much less the stitch for next Tuesday or ten years from now. But if I will listen, it will always tell me that next stitch. and I'm going to at least behave like I accept that the only glimpse of God's will I ever get in this life is for my own next stitch and the only real power I ever have in this universe is over that next stitch and I've stumbled that way over 29 years did it poorly don't think there's been a day when I thought I did it well enough to do any good and real quickly if in may of 1990 god had said and remember i had a great life uh then but if god had set down make a list of the best you think you can have in every area your life every area spiritual material professional aa car you drive home you live in everything and i'll give it to you and i had done that and god had granted it I would have shortchanged myself in every single area of my life. When I'm willing to truly behave like a person who comes as a little child and accepts that they've spent their whole life like an ant on a log floating down the river and the stupid ant thinks he's steering the log running back and forth driving himself insane where if the ant would just let go of the log and concentrate on the little ant crap right in front of him that he can do logs going where it's going anyway and ants a whole lot better off and when i've acted like i accepted that what had god got in in mind for me is unbelievable with the mess that my relationship life had always been may of 1990 i asked my sweet sharon out on a date i'd known her for seven years our daughters were classmates um she went and the only trick i used on sharon i didn't have an agenda or at least i committed and did behave like a person who did not because i can't switch i can'T change my mind that old crazy picture in the back of my head it's just gonna roll but it's not gonna hurt thing, but don't act on it. It's powerless. But at any rate, the only thing I did was pray to seek the love, comfort, and understand her, and seek to give her when I was with her my entire interest, attention, and love. And just like my hero Chuck Chamberlain says, whatever I give my entire interest, attention, and love to becomes the most interesting thing in the world, whatever it is. And my sweet Sharon and I have been married 26 years or 29 years, and we've never argued. And I sponsor some psychologists and counselors, and they tell me that's not healthy. And I tell them they are welcome to their healthy relationships. Thank you. I'm doing just fine. See, Sharon and I don't keep score, and we understand that courtesy is probably the most underrated spiritual trait on earth. Did you ever think about it that it's impossible to be discourteous and spiritual simultaneously? You can't do it. Cannot do it, and if I am courteous, I'm 90% of the road down the way to loving, comforting, and understanding others instead of trying to get them to love, comfort, and understand me. And Sharon and I are courteous with one another. It's such a shame that sometimes we're more courterous with strangers than we are with those closest to us. But courtesy and praying to love comfort and understand and giving my entire interest, attention, and love to whomever or whatever is in front of me has been absolute magic in human relations. The Bar Association that I so disgraced has honored me until it's embarrassing. They called me and they said, Don, we want you to be on this committee that interviews people that want to be judges and passes on where they're qualified. And then a couple, three years later, they said, Don, we want you to be chair of that committee. And then they come and say, come to the bar dinner. We're giving you the pro bono lawyer of the year award. And they come in and say come to the bar diner. We're given you the most coveted award at the bar, the one for professionality and civility. They come and said come be a master at the end of court with the most important lawyers and judges in Kentucky. We really need a tongue-chewing, drunken criminal defense lawyer that's been in the asylum 18 times. And God has such a sense of humor because I've been close with him. If you're all real lucky, I'll close with you. About 14, 15 years ago, I was sitting in the barber chair and my cell phone rang. It was the president of the state bar. And he said, Don, we've got an opening on the ethics committee they put me on the ethics committee, they put me on the ethics hotline invested me with the power that if a Kentucky lawyer had an ethics dilemma in criminal law if they called me and asked me what to do if they did what I said even if I turned out to be absolutely wrong, they were 100% insulated from disciplinary action and that's a lot of trust to put in a guy that's been in the asylum 18 times. And, you know, it's not just the seventh step prayer. It's all of them. It's the whole book. It's at the heart of the program. This deal is not about us being sober and happy and spiritual. That's a byproduct. The third step prayer, take away my difficulties. Not so I can be sober and unhappy. Take away my difficultions that Victor over there will bear witness to those I will tell of your power, love, and way of life. And, of course, we've already talked about the third step prayer. Take away only the ones that stand in the way of my usefulness to God and my fellows. And the eighth and ninth steps, with all their practicality, look on page 77. It says, yeah, we're trying to put our lives back in order, but that's not our real purpose. Our real purpose is to fill ourselves to be of maximum service to God and those around us. Guys, when I go down to my law office and try to look good, make money, do well, serve my clients, look good cover my butt, I wind up in the snake pit every single time. But when I go down there and try help God's kids do what they need to have done for fun and for free because I want to, God never fails to take care of me. The first sentence is of the chapter working on others, that nothing, that includes everything by the way, that includes meetings, sponsorships, not that those things aren't critical. They are necessary. But they won't so much ensure our immunity from drink as intensive works with other alcoholics. And I want to tell you my life is a testament to that very thing because I think I've made practically every spiritual mistake in the book in the last 38 years. but thank my loving God I've always been willing when another and for the last 30 odd years when another human being could be helped I've been willing to answer the bell and I have to quit worrying about taking care of me and let God do that I love you and it's a great weekend and thank you so much God bless