The Losing Plan for Living – Sandy B.

Well, good evening everybody. My name is Sandy Beach and I'm an alcoholic. How y'all doing? You hear me all right in the back? Yes? Do I have to get up closer? Okay. First of all, I want to acknowledge all the good work that Robinson House does. It's really important that those of us in Alcoholics Anonymous support these activities because there's nothing that officially belongs to AA, but we're really the ones who are going to benefit from this. And if it isn't us, these things just aren't going to survive. The men's home, the Robbins house, the women's home, all these things that are so crucial and so difficult to get started. You just try to go to a neighborhood and get one of these places started and it's just almost impossible. So to keep the ones that are in existence going is really essential that alcoholics have a place to get a restart in life. And we all are very grateful for the work all of them do and especially tonight that the Robinson house does I came into Alcoholics Anonymous on Pearl Harbor Day in 1964 and I haven't had the opportunity to have a drink since my first meeting and for that I'm very very grateful I like my sponsor says I didn't plan on sticking around this long when I I got here, I was just here to get some people off my back. That was my main reason for coming to Alcoholics Anonymous. I was locked up in a nut ward and had been released as an outpatient to go home. And after a couple of weekends of getting these passes to go out and back, I started drinking again because it wasn't that I was an alcoholic. There had just been some mistakes made, and I ended up having the DTs and convulsions. It's probably a world case there to have a non-alcoholic having the DCs. So I started drinkin'. And I smuggled the vodka back into the nut ward and had it out in the parking lot and I would sneak out there and I'd get a drink and I'll sit around during the week in the nut ward and sip vodka and you know when you start doing that again the paranoia starts and everybody's looking at you and I knew that it would just be a very short while then they were going to catch me and then they told me if I ever had another drink that was the end of my Marine Corps career which had been going on, amazingly, for about 13 years at that time. What is that? I don't know. You picking that up on a tape earlier? Good, you get that good sound in there. in any event I knew that this was all going to come to an end and so on this particular weekend Pearl Harbor Day weekend in 1964 I decided to call Alcoholics Anonymous on the outside we had been to about three meetings on the inside of the nut ward and I picked up the telephone from down in Quantico Virginia and called Northern Virginia Intergroup and asked them if they could send somebody over to help me with getting into AA. And it took about three hours, and I got a few drinks to stay down during that three hours and changed my mind. And I called Intergroup back and told them that I didn't need, that they could forget the call, that everything was under control and they said it was too late that somebody somebody was on his way and so i said well i'll just have to get rid of him at the door that was my plan that's how i got to aa so after a while the door frame shook when someone knocked from the outside it was like boom you know and i went to the door to opened it and no light came in through the doorframe you know what i I mean, it was just, this guy was filling the whole door frame. And he just said, hi, my name is Bill. I'm an alcoholic. This is a 12-step call. I talk, you listen. And that was the... And I don't want to talk to you. I want to take care of you. I want you to talk about your family. And he went right in and they started spilling the beans, you know, right away. Oh, he's terrible. He's rotten. He's a terrible father. He's terrible husband. He's drunk all the time. He's been locked up in the nut ward. He's had convulsions and DTs and malnutrition, and I'm just trying to get some literature. You know what I mean? I don't want to really join this organization. I just want to be able to tell the people in the nut ward that I've joined it and that everything's going to be all right. But my problem was I got this guy in my life, And it's almost 30 years later, and he's still in my life. I always mention this when I speak and start talking about Bill because last August was his 30th anniversary. So I called him up and told him I wanted to take him out to dinner. And he said, okay. So I went down, and we went to a German restaurant in Quantico, Virginia for dinner. And that restaurant used to be the house I lived in when he 12-stepped me. And so we're sitting at a table in there, and the front door is like right over there. And about halfway through the dinner, he turned and he said, you know, it's a long way from that door to this table. And it really was. I mean, when you think about what happened between that door and that table that we were sitting in, it was like going to Mars. It's like going someplace that I never even knew existed. And those of you that are new to Alcoholics Anonymous, you're going to go to places you don't even know about yet because that's what the AA journey is all about. It's not about just not drinking and going to meetings like it's some big burden. There is going to be a transformation in spite of yourself, And most of the program happens in spite of ourselves. Our better judgment, I don't really need the steps, and my better judgment I don' t need a sponsor. But the program doesn' t work that way. It' s one of the great disguises in the world to call our program a suggestion. Did you ever notice that? These are the steps we suggest and there' s no musts in AA and just come to the meetings and take what you want. Well, if you don't take it all, you get drunk. And alcohol works on you to open your mind a little further and then you come back and try everything. We don't need to persuade anybody to do anything because alcohol will do that work for us. That's why we don't have to put any pressure on anybody. You don't like AA? go back drinking come back and see us when you do like AA because there's no escape for the alcoholic you don't just go out and nothing happens you go out get beat up you go out and suffer more and that's what gives us an open mind to try the program and of course here I am locked up in a nut ward and I am still in denial that I have a serious problem. And so, I feel very grateful that this guy got into my life and made all of my choices disappear and we just got in that car every night and drove and we drove from Quantico and there weren't that many meetings. There were probably about 15 meetings a day in the Washington area and now we've got 250. So there's a lot of changes that have taken place. They're all wonderful. I think AA is better now than it was in the old days. I'm not worried about Alcoholics Anonymous at all. I think it's doing spectacularly. I know some of the old-timers go, Oh, it isn't the same as it was. Of course it's not the same as it once was, but it is the same as it used to be. It's a paradox. It's reaching out beyond the wildest dreams of any of the old-timers. And we are seeing people come into the program at younger ages and with all kinds of situations, and we're seeing tremendous acceptance across the country. And we're other programs copying these spiritual principles, and it's all being done because of the success of Alcoholics Anonymous. That's what AA has. It has a track record that is unbelievable. And so when this guy came into my life, it was getting the car. I thought getting the card was our first step in all honesty because he'd come over and I go, well, Bill, I'm not sure because I was always, you know, he wanted to go to a meeting every night for like 10 years. That was his basic plan for me. And I thought it was excessive and I thought there'd be some slack. And so he would come over and I'd go, well, look, Bill, you know, we've been to 12 meetings in a row now. And I was thinking he'd go get in the car. You know, it was just there was no, well let's hear what you have to say. Who cares what you have to save? And for a long time I wondered, you knows, if after three months, I was still an outpatient from the nut ward, but at three months back then, you spoke. You got up and you told your story. You started leading meetings and you just they just pushed you in to the mainstream besides there wasn't very many people so they needed everybody to speak uh to keep the meetings going and i would get up and come up with all kinds of wonderful ideas not exactly party line you know what i'm talking about and uh in terms of philosophy of life and all these things and a guy came up to me he was sort of knew. He had that glassy look and everything, but he was a smart aleck. And he came up after I gave this wonderful talk at about three and a half months, and he had like three weeks. You know, obviously knew nothing compared to what I knew. And he came up and he said, I'd just like to make one observation about your talk. And I said, yes. he said I find it very hard to listen to a guy wearing a wristband and I went oh I have the I had the wristband from the nut ward and it was still you couldn't get those damn things off you ever try and get them off and get him back on so that you could not be an outpatient and then when you went back in, you still had it on. And I mentioned this story because a lot of people who arrive here have a lot ideas. And some of them sound brilliant. And you come in here and you find that no one really wants to hear them. Have you noticed that? That before you got here, people used to go, oh yeah, they're interested. And then you come into here and And they go, just don't drink and go to meetings and say the serenity prayer. Certainly we can improve on that. I mean, my God, just Don't Drink, Go to Meetings, Say the Serenity Prayer. There's more to life than that. Let me tell you my thoughts on life and everything. And what the people in the program are basically saying to you, even though you're not wearing a wristband, is based just on looking at you. I don't want to know what your plan for living is. Because even though it sounds good, it's not getting good results. I'm looking and you look awful. You're befuddled. You don't know which end is up. You have no friends. You want me to listen to your ideas? No, I'm not going to do that. And so that's why no one's listening to you if you're new and you're coming up with your thoughts on sobriety and so on down. So this was one, you know, this is the beginning of humility. It's when all of your wonderful ideas have no value. And it's pointed out to me, if they're valuable, why haven't you been able to stay sober? Why haven't you been able to have a wonderful life? Why are you still holding on to those ideas? Why don't you examine your life only on the basis of results and not on the base of theory and basis of what your background was and what you were taught and whatyou learned off of bathroom walls and whatyoupickedupinthebar and whatyourheardfromsomeotherdrunk and put together as your collection of my philosophy of life, you know what I mean? Because it may sound good, but if we get honest and we look in the mirror, our plan for living sucked. I mean, if it was so good, why are you here? And so this is what I was being confronted with, and it was real. It was very frustrating because we're used to expressing ourselves and coming up with creative ideas. When we come in here, nobody wants to listen to us. Just shut up, don't drink, sit there. If you need an opinion, we'll give you one. And they were trying to take apart our intellectual approach to life and convert us to a spiritual approach to light. And that's a very difficult thing for us human beings to do, but that's what sobriety is all about. and for those of you that are new we don't this is only accomplished because of alcohol this is not accomplished because somebody's real smart and they convince someone else that they ought to have an open mind about this particular plan we get our open mind from drinking that's what produces that's why alcoholics anonymous works it works because we all have a common enemy And the enemy's going to kill us unless we find a solution that keeps us alive. And the only solution that has ever been found are the 12 steps. That's what this program is. And so it is only out of desperation that I was willing to part with my superior ideas. And if you're new, you're going to have to part with your wonderful ideas. And it's going hurt your ego. it's just going to be so crushing to have to abandon all these things that you thought up on your own. Your game plan for living is hard to get rid of because you wrote it. You are the author of this mess and for some unknown reason we like to cling to this. I know the plan sucks but it's my plan. You know what I'm saying? Like there's some dignity and value in standing by something that's awful. You know what I mean? There's a certain nobility in sticking with a losing plan. At least you won't be accused of wimping out in the face of reality. I see, I see what clearly ought to be done, but I'm sticking with this rotten plan. And Bill writes about this in the literature and it's not a complex psychological problem. He reduces things to great simplicity here in Alcoholics Anonymous. He calls this stupid. That's the word. That word is used. You go look in the 12 and 12 in the big book, you will see sentences all indisperse throughout at the end of a very complex psychological problem and he'll say we were especially stupid in this area and when you think about it for a human being to stick with a plan that is totally not working is stupid I mean it's the best word I've ever heard for it and it makes it real simple you just go you know he's right that is stupid. I'm out of here you know what I mean and we're able to let go of it whereas if it was some um I have this twisted childhood that forces me to hold on to these stupid plans and I'm doomed because of this parental background to fail forever. See, that's not as solvable as, oh, you're just stupid. You know what I mean? Oh. You can disengage much more quickly from that because it... So it's wonderful the simplicity of how we are approached in Alcoholics Anonymous to let go. Letting go is such a wonderful thing. We don't have to get anything to succeed in AA. You don't get anything here. You get rid of things. And that's what this sponsor was trying to do from the day I arrived. Get in the car, don't think. If you want an opinion, I'll give you one. Sit in the front row, incurable row. Just sit there. Put the cotton in your mouth and take it out of your ears. All this stuff, and I'm going, What is this, platitude anonymous? I mean, you just easy does it, day at a time, think. You know, like, couldn't we use some five-syllable words once in a while? And here it was. So I'm very grateful that this cleansing process was forced upon me. And I, like the rest of people in AA, take credit for it. I use sentences like, and then I decided to take a fourth step. and then I decided that I would try prayer and meditation and this creates the impression that I was attracted to these things that I sort of innately wanted to meditate and just gravitated towards it naturally and I'm omitting the preface to and then i decided and the preifice to that is one day my sponsor came over with a baseball bat he said if you'll get the fourth step done this weekend both legs so i decided to go ahead and and do a fourth step now a lot of you are going to become familiar with various steps because you're asked to lead on them and you're gonna go i have to lead on the on the seventh step where's the book I'm not going over there and look bad. Well, I've always thought about humility this way. And you're up there, you know, what the funny thing is, you learn about it. You're getting some new ideas about it, even if it's for the wrong reason. And so a lot of this stuff that happens in here is done for the right reason. It's done for a wrong reason? I mean, it isn't done in order to become spiritual. I don't know too many people who came in here and said, I've been wanting to be spiritual all my life, and I'm so glad I found this place. It was, I understand I have to stay in here or I get hurt out there. And in order to hang around here, you have to pretend that you're getting spiritual. So I'll go ahead, I'll do it. I'll try to go through the motions, but I'm not really interested in it. And so we do. So for whatever reason, we get driven down this road. Now, I don't generally spend a lot of time talking about my drinking story because everybody's drinking story is the same. I mean, you know, alcohol had a different effect on us than it does on other people, and that's why we're alcoholics. Alcohol caused things to happen in our lives that don't happen to non-alcoholics. See, I used to think we were all the same, and I always talk about my roommate when I think about this because we started drinking together and I thought we were very similar. We got arrested a couple of times. We had this and that, and then he went on and became a big businessman down in Dallas, and I went on to the nut ward. But then I got sober later on, and then I started getting around A.A. and talking at a few places, and Dallas was on my list several times, and they've got great A.I. down there. And he came to the meetings and really liked A.E. He just came to hear me, and he was so grateful to A.C. because his old buddy was now having a good life and things were really working well. And so we were both about 50, and I was over his house, and I said, Roy, let me ask you something. We both started drinking together, and we had a lot of similar experiences, but we never really talked about alcohol. You've heard me talk about it all over the place, but I've never heard you talk about alcohol, so now you look back 30 years of drinking. What do you say about alcohols? Tell me your internal assessment of alcohol. So he thought about it and thought about it, and you know what he said? He said, well, number one, alcohol makes food taste better. Number one. That was the number one thing that he said about alcohol, something I never would have come up with myself, and I doubt if anybody in here would have I said, hey, first thing I think of, alcohol makes food taste better. And I was thinking to myself, is that going down or coming up? You know, it makes food tastes better. And then he went on to say that it was something at the end of the workday he'd come home and he might mix a drink and have that and it would be a little transition from the work day to being at home. I could relate a little bit to that, but that was the only one he had. And then he talked about certain social settings when people get together, it would enable them to mix and they'd have a nice time. And that was his total take on alcohol. He never said, alcohol is the secret of living. He had no connection to that stuff at all. his relationship with alcohol was like his relationship with jello it's nice and I have it once in a while but it's not important because it does not solve any problems it doesn't fix anything, it doesn'T give me answers it doesn' t do anything that it does for all of us and that's why we're alcoholics it's because it DOES something FOR US that it DOes NOT do for the non-alcoholics it solves problems that's why we drank it did something it changed the world and that's when i look back at what alcohol did alcohol changed the word i lived in to a very friendly world and when alcohol was gone the world got mean again and people looked mean and when i looked in your eyes when i was sober i saw hostility and i saw that i didn't belong and i thought I wasn't the same as you. When I drank, I looked into your eyes again and I saw a friend. I saw somebody who loved me. I saw a world that was the most wonderful place to be. And I said, this is the world they're talking about because other people used to talk about what a wonderful world it was. And I never said that unless I was drinking. And then it was a wonderful worth of man. This is a place I love. So alcohol fixed a problem now it started causing problems too don't get me wrong there's a but i was willing to endure those problems because of what i was getting out of alcohol and when somebody said well geez you got arrested three times you got your teeth knocked out i would say that's a small price to pay for what i'm getting i'm willing to pay that price that's nothing compared to what I'm getting, I'm getting freedom. I'm Getting Feeling of Equality. I Belong. I'm Getting Companionship. I'm Getting Energy. I'm Intuitively Knowing How to Handle Situations That Used to Baffle Me. I'm Getting Free from Economic Insecurity. I'm Getting All the Promises of Vodka. I'm Getting Everything. And So Alcohol Was a Power That I Had Faith In. So That's What Makes Me an Alcoholic. Non-Alcoholics Don't Have faith in alcohol. They just have a casual relationship with it. People that I take out for lunch in a business setting, once in a while one of them will have a drink. It's amazing how seldom people have a Drink. I used to hang around, we all drank. I don't know what's happening to the world. And the guy will order a drink and say well I'll have a scotch and soda. I said I'll have a coca-cola and we're sitting there at lunch and I go well cheers and he goes cheers and And he takes his scotch and soda, and he goes, boy, you know, they've done a lot of changes up on the House Banking Committee going on. I said, yeah, they really are. And, you Know, over in the Senate there's a lot of things going on, and next thing he puts it down, the food comes, and he still hasn't had a sip out of this thing. It's still sitting on the table. It's just being jiggled around. He picks it up once in a while and points to somebody with it and puts it around here, and I'm sitting there just going, drink the goddamn thing! What are you doing with that thing? And he's just walking around like it's a pointer or something. There's just no... His relationship with that drink wasn't what mine was. Boom! So that's my drinking story. I had that relationship with alcohol, and I was willing to die for it. And damn near did, and I'm sure most of you damn near did. And if you'd hung in there any longer, you would have. I could not imagine how you could survive without alcohol. That's where I came from. And I went all the way into the nut ward. I had malnutrition and DTs and all these things, but I'm still hanging in with my idea that alcohol was always going to have to be my answer. And as long as I had access to it i drinking money in my wallet then i was safe in this world and when that was gone i was vulnerable i was threatened and i was frightened and iwas anxious and angry and resentful and it was a very difficult place to be in and so when i got the alcoholics anonymous and somebody said no more drinking i said like everybody you don't understand you're asking me to give up my whole way of life. And they go, that's right, but we're going to give you a new way of life. And so that's the difference between AA and going on the wagon. When we go on the wagon, we give up our way of light and we have nothing to replace it. And we sit there with the neck muscles straining and people say, what's going on? I said, I'm not drinking. And somebody goes, how long have you been not drinking? An hour! an hour you know i'm gonna try and make it a week and it's like i don't think you're gonna make it through tonight i mean you might as well give in now just start drinking because you're not going to make it and so how anybody can think of long-term sobriety in that mode of pure willpower sacrifice is beyond me. And we come in here and we are told that we're not going to get what we thought we were going to getting when we got here. See, what I thought we were gonna get once my brain cleared up a little bit and I got here in AA, I thought we're going to solve my alcohol problem because that's what I had been doing all my life. Got a problem? Let's break it down, discuss it, and come up with a solution to it. And then you do the solution. Came in here and they said, no, we don't do that at all. As a matter of fact, once you come in here an admit you're an alcoholic, we're not even going to talk about alcohol anymore. Have you noticed that, that we don' t talk about alcohol at all in the recovery of Alcoholics Anonymous. We just say, are you powerless over alcohol? Yes, I am. Good. Now we're going to do all the rest of these things and the word alcohol isn't in there anymore. We're never going to even talk about alcohol anymore. We're goingto talk about spirituality. We're gonna talk about a higher power. We're gongo talk about all kinds of things. We're not going to talk about alchohol. We got rid of that in the first step. if you are an alcoholic and you are powerless then you need to spend the rest of your life finding a power to take care of the powerless problem because the whole premise upon which AA is founded is based on the word powerless and it doesn't say that you're ignorant over alcohol and that you have to study and learn your way out of this situation, it said you're powerless You have encountered something that is more than you can handle as a human being or ever will be able to handle. So if you try to go through the rest of your life by yourself, you are doomed to being overpowered. That's the nature of our problem. Now, you can disagree with that and try to prove that you're not powerless over alcohol. but I submit if you're an alcoholic alcohol is going to win and alcohol is going to convince you that you're powerless over alcohol not me not the program alcohol is what convinces us that we're powerless over alcohol if you don't believe it this year keep going and eventually you just go I just can't win I cannot stay sober and it's important I always mention this it's not that we are powerless over alcohol after we've been drinking. It's that we're powerless over alcohol when we're sober. That's what alcoholism is. It is the inability to not take the first drink when you know it's going to kill you. You are taught, you go through detox, you're an alcoholic. If you take the first drink, you will be in terrible trouble. Do you understand that? Yes. Oh yes. I understand fully. It's almost like somebody said to you, look, if you start a softball game on Shirley Highway at eight o'clock in the morning, you're going to get hurt. There's trucks, there's all that. I understand that. You want to play first and you want to pay second. And they're out there and everybody's just all over. And you just go, whoa. So we explain it. If you take a drink, all these bad things and you understand. So this is you totally sober, totally in command of all your faculties your mind is working at 100% and you're explaining your situation to your bartender who's normally our best friend Fred I'm an alcoholic. I have been taught what this means. Maybe you don't understand the significance of what an alcoholic is. If I take a drink, for example, if I were to order a Budweiser and drank it, I would end up in jail. I would End up in DTs again. My liver might go all the, could I have a Bud Weiser? My liver Might go all The way my wife. Yeah, thanks. My wife told me she will excuse me, leave me. And we're explaining all about our situation and we're drinking because we don't have a defense against the first drink. So that's what our situation is. Unless something comes between us and the first drank, we will always pick up the first drink. That's what being powerless is. And that's a serious problem. That is a very serious problem. It means every one of us, absent a power, is always going to pick up the first drink and go back and have all this thing happen. So that the first step is really bad news. It's what it's saying is, hi, welcome to AA. Your situation's a lot worse than you thought it was. Are you going to buy that? Good. Now you're saved. Now the good news. See, the good News is in the surrendering and everything that happens in sobriety is a paradox. It's just the opposite of what we've been used to before we got here and we come in and we are told if you want to win, if you absolutely want to succeed, you must surrender because that is how you win in a spiritual environment is to totally give up. Then you can be set free and it just looks backwards from everything we've been taught. And there's just a few other things that I would share with those of you that are new about what I think about this program. It's a lot of fun, and there's a little bit of fun and there is a lot to humor in our own mistakes. And when we can see how funny some of the positions that we have taken and are willing to die for really are, and we can start laughing at ourselves because everybody else had to laugh at themselves for holding on to some of these stupid ideas, it really becomes a much more enjoyable way of life is to realize, wow, another stupid idea I can get rid of. And this is what freedom is all about is being unglued from our ideas so that they can float away and never bother us again. The problem is our ego doesn't like this process at all. We don't like being wrong. And if there's anything sobriety is, it's finding all kinds of things that we're wrong about and getting rid of them. And then what's left is the truth. And that is what is the great journey that we get forced into as we go down the road to sobriity. Let me make another thought to those of you that are new. this plan, this wonderful way of life will never look like it's going to work. Never, ever, ever will it look like it's not going to be working. It's not looking like it is going to work. That's another strange thing about a spiritual program. Meetings don't look like they should work, do they? Do you ever think about these meetings? Do you every tell your friends about AA and they go, Mary, you look wonderful. What are you doing? Are you on a diet? No, actually, I'm in AA. I've been in there for about six months. Oh, you look wonderful. Gee, I've never seen such a change. Do you jog? I mean, what happens in AA? Well, we have meetings. Meetings make you look this much better. Oh, yeah. Boy, they must be something. What happens at these meetings? Well, We sit around a table like 20 of us and one person will come up with a topic like one day at a time. we all talk five minutes hold hands say the lord's prayer just like that it's wonderful you want to come want to come join in this exciting way of life no that's all right mary maybe that alcohol did more damage than we thought so this stuff doesn't look like it should work at all i still go to meetings at night and i go in there, and I'm all bent out of shape. And I sit there and listen to a bunch of semi-intelligent ideas, hold hands, and walk out feeling wonderful. I go up to my car and go, what a world, what a world. And what happened? There was power there. There was the power to transform my thinking. And that's what happens in these meetings, and that's What happens as a result to these steps and our wonderful program. So I made one observation that this stuff will never look like it's going to work. So if you come in and you're used to these problem-solving in your life and somebody says the 12 steps are the answer and you go, good! I mean, you're all excited. You're new and everybody's telling you this is it. So you're taking it seriously now. So you go home and you get the damn book and you say, so this is the book and you start reading it and you got no connection. Anybody ever do this? You go, maybe it's on some other page. This is what they're all excited about? Fearless moral inventory? Making amends? I don't think I explained to them what my situation was. I'm going to have to go back and tell my sponsor one more time. Bill, I'm broke, man. I'm broken. I'm break. I got people knocking on the door. I've got bill collectors. You give me this shit about a fearless moral inventory, I need a loan is what I need. I don't get this. And maybe you're just getting divorced or your relationship is just all that. Why don't you go make amends? Make amends. I'm going to kill somebody. I don'T connect that this is the answer to my problem. and maybe you're, bro, or you need a job. And you look and you say, I need a job. That's what I need. Then I'll have, I can get going again. I can have something going. And they say, here's the answer. No job? Here, here. Where? Where is the no job part of this? Or you could just have been to the doctor, and he says, oh, you got this awful health problem. Oh, God, I got this health problem health problem right here where i don't see uh which one is the health problem step i don t i don' t see that and all of a sudden no matter what your problem is people keep telling you to keep doing this and you suddenly are confronted with the unalterable truth that Alcoholics Anonymous is trying to foist on you the proposition that there is one answer for all problems, one solution for all problems. Are you going to buy into that as unique as you are? There's already a solution been developed for every one of your problems. Are you going to buy into that? Well, I would submit that you're the last person that should doubt one solution for all problems. Because what were you doing before you got here? I have to admit that I had one solution for all problem, and it was vodka. and I never remember sitting around my house and saying to myself, you know, here's a situation I won't be drinking over. Here's a real tough area that I'll be dealing with with no alcohol. It never came up. It did not matter what the problem was. the answer was, I'm going to go get a drink. Then I will intuitively know how to handle these things. I will get the intuition. I Will get the freedom to think. I would get the energy. I will Get the perspective. I'll just be filled with creativity. One answer for all problems. We come in here and they go, here's 12 steps. One Answer for all. Oh no, no, No, no, no. And I think the rest of your sobriety, if you're anything like I am, will consist of encountering problems that are the exception to the steps. Uh-oh, I just came across one that the steps don't apply to. I'll have to use my own devices on this one. And then you come to the meeting and people go, What's the matter? You look like you're going to die. Well, just say a serenity prayer. Don't drink. Go to meetings and help a new guy. oh thanks a lot and we've been forced back into the solution well I'm sort of rambling around here I don't want to run over time so let me look at my watch oh yeah we're almost there and I haven't said anything isn't that amazing a non-talk Let me make a couple of observations about what, if you're new, you can expect as a result of following what your sponsor and what your groups and we just get pushed down the same path. We all end up going down a certain path. we're going to find out that we were wrong about a lot of things and that as we discover this we get free from these wrong ideas and these ideas have done two things they've blinded us to the truth of the world that we lived in, and they prevented a higher power from flowing through us. So we never were able to experience a higher power, a personal one in our own lives, one that caused us to have an entirely different view of our world, even though the world stayed exactly the same. We still don't have a job, working on the relationship. We're still dealing with a health problem, but the world looks wonderful. There was no reason for us to change our point of view. There wasno external circumstance to cause us tochange, and yet we changed. And we became positive instead of negative, with no apparent reason. Now that can only be explained that something has happened inside of us. Something has come in and given us a different perspective on this world that we weren't too comfortable with. That is what sobriety is, in my opinion. And it consists, as I said earlier, of not getting anything but getting rid of things. Somebody once wrote that you already are all that you can ever become. Now, that may sound absolutely false. That may sound, wait a minute, I already am all that I can be. Yes, you just have to be able to see it. You need the power to see what a magnificent person you already are. You have to get rid of the false ideas about yourself in order to be able to say you already aren't a magnificent child of a higher power. You are a divine creation and you have a bunch of ideas to say this isn't true. A lady who did this beautiful sculpture of a marble statue of a woman in a long gown with all these graceful lines and everything was asked, how do you ever create something that beautiful? And she said, I just get a big block of marble and I take away everything that isn't this beautiful statue. The beautiful statue is already there. He just gets rid of the stuff that isn't the beautiful statue. And if you're new, you already are this beautiful statue, you already ARE this magnificent creature. We just get rid, in this program, that's all you do is get rid of character defects. That isn't real you. Those are just old ideas that are stuck to you like crap. And it's just got to be scraped off. We just got a dig in there. You know, you are a present that gets unwrapped. The thing that AA gives each one of us is ourselves. They just bring a box up and say, Merry Christmas, we have a present for you. It's you. Now open it. Open it. Oh, I don't want to open it! I don' t want to see the real me. The fourth step, you're going to think, I don''t want to se the real Me. Why? I don ''t think I'm going to like what I find. What tells you that? I just know. I just know. What do you know? Well, I've just always had these feelings. Just forget all that. And so we get rid of all these things that are not the real us. That to me is what this program is all about is getting rid of these things that block us from a higher power and from the love of other people. I believe that alcoholism and the self-centeredness force each one of us to build a little jail for ourselves. Only we call it a safe place. This is where we can hide from the world so it won't get in and bother us and hurt us and threaten us. But when we're in there, we're totally isolated from everything else and nothing can come in. And as we sit in there we claim that there's no love in the world and we claim there's no higher power. None of it ever got in there. That's because we have the power to build something that can block out all these things. If you're new to AA and you were sent here with a court slip, you can block AA from coming in. You've got free will. You can go like this and you can say I'm not listening. None of this is coming in and I'm going to allow any of that message to come inside. And then later on, you'll be out there saying, well, you know, I tried AA and it didn't work. So from your perspective, AA doesn't work, but it really does. And a higher power really exists. And people really are wonderful. And they really do love you. And you really are a loving person. You really care about the world. All those other ideas are wrong. They're not true. and that's what the present is. That's what the 12 steps are. You just unwrap more, unwrap, get rid of this. That's not the real you. Nope, that's not the real me. That's the real you either. That's out the window and I know you probably don't believe me if you knew this guy is exaggerating. Well let me close with this. If you've been around three months or so the chances are that you've been to a meeting when somebody new came in you know like in their first two or three days and you're sitting over at the table discussion meeting you see this guy or gal come in and they go over to get a cup of coffee you know that they're new i mean they're you just were there so you remember this very well and they don't want to be here and they're looking around funny and they try to get the coffee and it starts to shake so they put the cup down they don't i won't even have any coffee they sit over atthe table they're sitting on their hands and they're watching they want to get out of here and youre sitting there watching this and all of a sudden it's like somebody reached in and grabbed your heart and it just raced over to that person. You just went, oh, and you just connected. You just go, how do I know what that is? And without realizing it, you went home that night and you're secretly rooting for this person. You just goes, boy, I hope that guy's there next week. And then you come back the next day. You never talked to him. You haven't got that far yet. But it, something happened. You didn't even do this voluntarily. It just, boom, your heart just went out and you just went, man, make it, man. And he'd come the next week and he's not there. And you're sitting around, oh, I wish I had talked to him. About 15 minutes into the meeting, here he comes. And he's still sober. He looks a little better and he gets a half a cup and he got that all the way over the table. And you know what? You're not showing anything on your face But inside you're going, yay! Well, what's that all about? What's that all about. What part of you is going, yay, for somebody else. I'll tell you what that part is. That's the real you. That's who you really are. And that's what this program is going to draw out to such an extent that you're gonna look in a mirror one day and just go, wow, I love that person. Just like we already love you. Thank you very much.