The Magnetic Pull of a Man with a Solution – Tom F.

Hi, folks. I'm Tom Ivester, an alcoholic. I'm one of those folks, Harmony says, talk's funny. And the warning was, don't say much, but it takes us an awful long time to say it. And Mike told me I could talk as long as I wanted to, but y'all were going to quit listening about 825. So I'm going to get boogieing as fast as I can. Excuse me. My sobriety date is February the 2nd of 57, and it's not nearly as bad as it sounds if I'm about to get used to it. I'm a member of the Primary Purpose A group in Southern Pines in North Carolina, and I'm delighted to be here, delighted to get a chance to make amends for my Burbank trip to Las Vegas. For those who might not be informed, I was scheduled to speak here last year sometime, and I was in Burbank, leisurely a little jaunt. Four hours took me seven, and we met at Marie Callender's after the meeting. So I'm really glad to be back for my men's meeting. Our stories disclose generally what we're like, what happened, what we like now. I'm somebody who you gather from that date that didn't just fall off the turnip truck yesterday. That's the second of this month I celebrated my 48th year of continuous sobriety, and that's a long time. I appreciate that, but I wanted to make a point about what I'm going to get at here in a minute. I had one of my ambitions, and I'm sure some of you shared it when I came into AA and decided I was really going to try to make it was to reach a point where I'd been sober as long as I had drunk. And that day came, and it felt good, and I now have been sober six times longer than I drank. And that's amazing. So most of my life has been in recovery, and partly for that reason and partly just because I wanted to do it. I want to kind of tackle this thing a little bit different. It's the same story, but I wantto tackle it a littlebit and maybe lay appropriate emphasis on that lifelong journey of recovery and talk about that and just kind of interlace a little bit. So we'll see what happens with that. I was a guy when the fog lifted, and I took a look around at my newest reality, and God knows how many times I've done that. And every time I did, I always looked it over and then went right back where I came from. But the last time when I emerged from the latest fog and took a look around, I want to share with you what I saw. I saw a young guy, he was 24 years old, sitting in a maximum custody penitentiary, serving a crime that's so horrendous that there's no suitable punishment for it. There just simply isn't any. In a drunken blackout driving down the main street of a city, I ran down and killed two people. And how you deal with that, I know that, sure, everybody in this room has dealt with that. Fortunately, not at a personal level, but at the end of the fear level. And I don't know of alcoholics who haven't lived a great fear of doing some of that. For most people, those fears are just bad dreams. But for some folks, they're real nightmares. So I came to that realization. And so I'm looking at a life that had been culminated with an act so horrendous that there really is no suitable punishment. And I'm living in a zoo of a place locked up with 6,000 other people, absolutely convinced that I would never breathe free again and honest to God didn't care. It didn't matter. It wasn't that I was angry or bitter or anything. I had just absolutely given up any notion or even desire to live again. I was almost like a guy in a coma, in a way, because when that happened, I was so overwhelmed with grief and shame and remorse for obvious reasons that I couldn't even contemplate living life. I felt deeply ashamed to be breathing. And so that's a strange-looking somebody to be taken a look at. But let me add to that just a little bit more. When I looked at that life, it was untenable. when I look back to the life that had preceded it. I was 24 years old, and in the first 24 years of my life, and this is not soap opera. This is not melodrama. It's an absolute fact. In the first24 years ofmy life, I could not think of one redeeming act that I had ever committed. I couldn't think of onething that I'd ever done to completion nor done successfully or had a sense of achievement, not a single one that I could call forward. I held the job in the Army for over a year, but I didn't want to. I kept trying to quit, and every time I'd quit, they'd come get me and put me in jail, and then they finally got tired of that silly game and threw me out with an undesirable discharge for alcoholism at the age of 20. Here I am, just a young shaver getting started in life, and I'm thrown out as unfit for military service. So when I look back at that life, it was characterized by nothing but failure from A to Z. When I looked at the people in my life, I couldn't think of one single person, not one, that would not have literally been better off if they'd never seen me. Now a lot of people were trapped. You know, family, they couldn't do anything about it. They were just there. And I was an inescapable part of their lives for better or worse and mostly worse. But not one single person that got involved with me that didn't regret it, either got used, misused, abused, mistreated, taken advantage of, hurt, disappointed, disillusioned, scared to death. That's the legacy that I looked at when I look back at my life and what it had been. Everybody that ever got close enough to me to be hurt got hurt. Fortunately, most people could spot me a block away and could get out of the way. but some people just were trapped. So that's what I'm looking back into history. I just can't suck out of that little thing there. My ears are popping from trying to get a drink. Now down south, we call that drinking. So that is what I am looking at. But when I look at the future, there is none. There is none if I even thought about the future it looked like a dark cave. There was absolutely nothing there and so that's the guy who sat there November the 20th of 56 and took a look when that fog cleared and I saw what had gone on and if you were looking at that person as a possible candidate that you'd like to refer for, hey, you might have done it on a need basis, but I doubt that you would have done it on an confidence basis. I wouldn't have bet one cent on that dude. Little did I know that though I don't recommend it, in a very real sense, there couldn't be a better starting point. In our book, it talks about, Bill liked the words And it talks about the state of mind. The mind went beyond it a little bit, but it talked about the state of mine that preceded every time I came to in the latest mess. I always, in the latter days, had that overwhelming sense of pitiful, incomprehensible demoralization, eh? And this was it in spades. And so I'm looking at that and it was no prospect. I tell you something that those of you who know me, and I've got a lot of friends that are here. I'm delighted to see all my buddies here. But the people who know Me know that I am more than a little active in service. And I'm not active in servic because I'm a good guy or because I' m a dedicated idiot or a missionary. I'm active in services for one good reason. it's amazing how loyal we become to what worked for us when you look back to the point I guarantee you if you're brand new in the program if you look back to what were the events that entered into the picture when you started to get a real foothold in sobriety and I don't care what it is it can be the state mental hospital but there will be a loyalty to it second to none And so it stands to reason, I guess, that I would have a deep and abiding kind of commitment. It's a simple kind of a philosophy that's part of my service commitment. I believe that every time an alcoholic hits the wall, and God knows we hit many, that every Time we hit the wall and somebody scoops us up, we ought to be able to be dealt with by somebody who understands that there's a solution for that problem and who will take the time to tell us where it is and the reason I say that what started to happen in my life, I was called out for an interview one day now I'm thinking nothing but morbid thoughts, and let me add one other thing to that, and I honest to God believe this, I can't prove it, don't don't need to, but I absolutely believe it. If my getting involved in Alcoholics Anonymous had required one ounce of initiative from me, I would never have come. I would never have came. And it's not because I thought I was too good. It's not because I was two bullheaded. I was absolutely so beaten and humiliated and guilt-ridden. I could not have asked anybody for help. I just could not have brought myself to do it, and I know that without any question, and that's one of the reasons I am so grateful for what happened that started to bring about a turning point that for the first time in my life turned in the right direction. Very simple. Every time I'd ever hit the wall, there would always be somebody there that would scoop me up and then put me through all that old intake interview stuff and go through so, God knows I've written enough social histories. I ought to do a genealogy study. I mean, I just make them up. I got tired of filling the forms out so much, I'd just tell them anything. Abraham Lincoln was my grandfather. That didn't matter. Because they were all the same, you know. It was almost just routinely repetitious. And so this guy called me out, and that's what his job was, was to do an intake on me. and I did my deal. When he got through, he made the same diagnosis that everybody who had ever did that with me came to. And it was always something like, my God, you drink a lot. You know, that was obvious. Or you're an alcoholic. You're drunk. You're a problem. I'd heard all of that stuff. And every time, now bear in mind frame of reference you know what i'm the period i'm talking about about predated detox predated rehab you know the close thing to a to a detox was a jail i always thought the hypodermic replaced the blackjack that was the only way i ever knew you did detox the drug hit him upside the head and lock him up it's the only one i ever new so this guy did got through with his thing he made the same diagnosis he said man you've had a lot of trouble with booze I said yeah took a real rocket science to tell that and so this guy came to the conclusion and I think thank God somebody I hope it was one of us but somebody told him when you see a guy and he's got a case like that and it's all about booze tell him he ought to go to AA Well, that's exactly what he did. He said, man, you've had a lot of trouble with food. And he said, we have an AA group here at the institution, and I think you ought to go. That was exactly how dramatic that was. It was just real straight matter-of-fact stuff. You've got a drinking problem. If you're hungry, go eat. There's food over there. If you've got an drinking problem, here's AA. Well, I had never heard of AA. I never heard of anybody helping a drunk And AA was a totally foreign term to me I'm grateful that he didn't try to explain it Because I don't think he knew any more than me That they just told him When you see one Tell him you ought to go over there And the amazing thing is The amazing thing Is That I responded To the first invitation I ever heard And have never looked back now obviously I wasn't healed by that social worker but if you catch a drunk at the right time and can point the way at the right time there's a good chance the dude may give a whack at it because here's one and so I'm deeply deeply grateful for that when other people would tell me that I ought to stop drinking I never could think of a good reason to stop drinking. I mean, I never Could. Once in a while, I'd do it just for patriotism or something. But I'd quit and declare myself pure, going to quit smoking, cussing, chasing women. I'm going to do it all. I'm Going to start working out big time. And that's 30 minutes sober. I mean I'd always get into that. The only time I ever got arrested sober in my life, I'd gotten on one of those health fitness kicks when I was sober. And I was out in an athletic field at about 4 o'clock in the morning because I went to work 6 when I had a job. And the police, well, they knew me. I mean, God, I was a regular customer. And they saw me out there in that funny-looking suit running around that field, and they just drove the squad car right out on the field and said, get in. I said, wait a minute, man, I'm not doing anything. They said, yeah, right. Get in the car. And it took me forever to convince those fools that I was, well, anyway. I never could think of a good reason to quit drinking except for those brief intervals of lucidity or whatever that was, but drinking was the only pleasure I had. My God, that's the only relief I had, that' s the only social mixer I had and here's somebody telling me to give up, give me the life preserver, you'll be okay, you know, yeah, right, I never could and I tell you this, I don't know if I'm the dumbest cat in the barn or what, but I never connected until I was sober for a good while. I never collected the first drink with what happened. Never did. When I first got in the A, I'd hear people talking about the first drink and what one horrible thing that was. I never could figure out what it was. I mean, it sounded to me like when they had a drink, they had to fit or something. They didn't fall out kicking. Well, my God, I never did anything like that. First drink never did nothing to me. All I did was have the second drink. And then the third, no big deal. And then a little later, wake up in jail in Georgia somewhere. But I never put that together. I thought the reason I wound up in bad places, bad circumstances, was that I was no good, that I was no good. Bill lived down south. Some of y'all would confess to that also. But Bill lived down there. We have a word down south that covers a multitude of sins. We call it sorry. Sorry. It's just descriptive. That's not apologetic. That's a real strong adjective. It's sorry covered everything I'm talking about. Now, every time I'd wake up in jail or laying in my own vomit or somebody else's or whatever in the wrong state. Woke up one time, told them it was detox day. Wokeup one time married to a lady I didn't even know. Now, I guarantee you that'll frost your mutton. That's a bad deal. That wouldn't be a big deal in Las Vegas, but it's a big thing in North Carolina. So anyway, but I never connected that. When I'd wake up in one of those kinds of weird situations, I never once thought, not once, geez, boy, you shouldn't have started drinking. I thought I did that because it was no good. I was worthless. I was just sorry. And I honest to God believed that. And so when I looked at that, and here's this guy telling me about something called AA. Never heard of it. I didn't have any instant attraction to it. I mean, good God, looks like we could have done better naming this thing than Alcoholics Anonymous. My God, that's a yucky name. Who wants to be secret drunks? wouldn't you like to join the society of secret drunks i don't just seem some kind of tacky kind of kind of a thing i understand it now but i didn't understand it when i'm trying to figure out where is this guy sending me alcoholics anonymous i figured it was going to be some great big tent with a guy in a black suit and carrying his own personal snake is about what i expected and uh i mean i couldn't imagine trying to help drunks with anything other that's all i'd ever heard it would be every once while county jails people come there'd be some fat old men come in there sing amazing grace and and offer some kind of conversion every time they do that i just blubber good god i just fall pieces and convert to whatever they were selling and it'd last a good 30 minutes yeah so I knew it had to be something like that and then I the day came a guy sent me a letter not a letter just a little piece of paper said you can go to your first meeting February 2nd of 57th and uh I didn't want to go there I didn'T want to do anything I what I wanted to do was what I had been doing up to that point that was sit at my cell and stare at my navel or do anything I could do to keep from thinking. That's exactly what I want to do. I didn't want to mix with people, for God's sakes. I didn' t want to speak to anybody. Yet, I was so beaten. You ever been so beaten that you were just out of fight? That's exactl y what it was. I was just beaten. I had absolutely no fight. When that note came, I wandered over. I looked like a guy on Thorazine shuffling over to the meeting. and walked in, huge meeting. They had 300 members in that group. And when I walked in there was one guy spoke to me, had an officer on the door at Ivester and I said, yes sir. He said sit out. And I sat out in the middle of that 300 foot, well not in the Middle, sort of safely on the perimeter where the president is over there. Safely on the parameter. And had one hand firmly to the door handle. You know, I'm about halfway in and about halfway out. And so I wanted to get them, if they started any zapping, I wanted them to get out of there before they got me. And so, I was rather gingerly perched on my seat and listened to my first aid meeting. It didn't run like this. Y'all stop, start, get going, take a break before you even start. I mean, my God, I's still sitting down and we're on a coffee break. we got didn't get any coffee either but anyway they uh we started out and they opened with a prayer and I admitted they said that prayer I said I knew it I knew IT and then they read all this stuff my god they read everything but the phone book and uh and uh it sounded churchy to me it didn't sound like it and so I'm sitting there watching everything then they turned the speaker loose now if you think I'm weird you're probably right but if you if you think I weird you should have seen that guy that man got up told his story and I swear to God I never heard any decent human being tell anything like that that was the worst thing I could why is he doing that I mean my god 300 hairy-legged convicts, and he's there just absolutely undressing himself. And I thought, why would he do it? It made no sense to me. And the language he spoke was utterly foreign to me, I did not identify with one syllable of any word he uttered. I mean, not one syllable. I've heard a lot of people, well, quite a few, say that the minute they walked in, they said, home at last. I found my people. When I joined hands, the electricity just shot through me and I knew I was there. I'll guarantee you that's as far away from how I felt as you could possibly get. I felt like I was on the wrong planet. It just didn't, those people in there, and they're all drunks, locked up just like me. But they seemed so different than me that it was pitiful. And I felt anything but at home. Sat there feeling totally out of place. I was 24 years old and in 1957, 24 year olds were not coming off the production line at any rate that I could see. I was the youngest member in every meeting I attended for years. And I got so sick of folks patting me on the head and telling me how lucky I was. Yeah, Jesus, what a run of luck. Well, I've screwed up worse than Hogan's goat, and then I wind up condemned to a geriatric ward for the rest of my life. And so this guy told that story. And I left there more confused than I was when I went in. And the amazing thing, I understand it now, but I couldn't have explained it to anybody then nor myself. Nothing there made any sense. I didn't walk out of there with, geez, I'd love to be an Alcoholics Anonymous or I'd have loved to try this thing called recovery or maybe there would be something there for a guy like me. Not one single thing of that. But the next week I found myself right back there sitting there one more time. And nobody came and got me. Nobody said, gee, you better come to that meeting. If I hadn't come, nobody would have looked for me. They wouldn't even know when I was gone or cared. But I found oneself back. There was a guy who wrote a book one time called Anatomy of a Murderer. Anatomy Of A Murderer, made a movie out of it. And what he was talking about was irresistible impulse, you know, an irresISTable impulse. And in a way that's what that was. It wasn't overpowering. It was subtle, but it was powerful in that it drew me back just like a magnet draws a piece of metal. And I know today what that was. That man who spoke at that first meeting became my first sponsor a year later. He started speaking English very well when I learned to listen to it and became a first sponsor. But what that man communicated to me was not something that I could relate to in terms of experience or in terms of how his makeup, but he was without doubt the most charged up, enthusiastic, dynamic person I had ever met. And what drew me back was that magnetic pull of that guy with a solution that said, in effect, what he said was there's life after sobriety. Now, I couldn't have articulated that, but that's exactly what it was. I found myself sitting back, couldn't tell anybody why was there nobody's business I never missed a single meeting they kept me there three and a half years and told me they could let me go if I would go to North Carolina and I told him let me consider that and I'd see if I wanted to go to North Carolina you know about how much I considered that but in what that started that day was probably the darkest period of my entire life and to those of you new to the program I hope that you will hear and believe this what was the darkest point in my life turned out to be the doorway to the brightest life I was ever to know heard a thing one time a guy named Kierkegaard wrote And he put it in a lot more flamboyant language, but what he said was that what God would use, he first reduces to nothing. He doesn't bargain. He deals with surrender. And that was what was so important about finding that low point of my life and then saying, here's something, give it a shot. And so I kept going back. Now, I was extremely fortunate in that the recovery group there at that prison was one of the finest aid groups I've ever seen. I'm really impressed with this one here, the number of commitments. We have 56 commitments in this group. Most groups in North Carolina, Bill, we don't even have that many members. That's phenomenal. That's phenomenal because I'm one who believes that action really is the magic word. That's not just podium talk, folk. Action is the Magic Word, and that's what those commitments are. They're invitations to the action. So good God, don't let those things go unfulfilled. Be selfish. Get yours. Let the other guy bang into it. You know, just let him race you for it. I went in my group. I diverged just for a second. I went in my group one night, and after a meeting, I was back in the kitchen washing a coffee pot. A young girl came up, and she said, Why are you washing that pot? I said, Man, this thing was dirty. You wouldn't believe how dirty this sucker was. And so I figured I'd just go on and wash it. She said, That's my job. I said、 Well, you're going to have to be quicker with your job. Now, I would just push her away from the trough. But, I mean, I'm going to get mine. I'm going to get mine one way or the other. And so the recovery group was a good, strong action group. And I later became one of the leaders in that group. But it was a great group because I was a leader. It was a very good group in the sense that we had well-planned meetings. We had a speaker one meeting, step meeting the next week, and we did all of that stuff. We arranged it and did a great job. They had a little lay, and I later become part of it. had a little deal where we would spin off the new members and then just spend a few weeks not going through the steps like we tend to do now, but just introducing to the program of action laid out in the steps. That was fundamentally important to me because I had a kid around about a little bit, but before I started school, I quit church because I was drug into that sort of fundamentalist foamy mouth kind of stuff down there in the Bible Belt and it didn't take with me. A lot of people did well with it, better than I did, but it just didn't take. And before I went to school, I promised as soon as I got big enough to get out of there, folks wouldn't be bothered with me anymore. And they weren't for a long long time. And so when I was saying about the attitude I had when I walked in, that was absolutely a huge, huge barrier. You don't have to be real smart to figure out there's a whole bunch of spirituality in this program. I was doing a beginner group one night, and there was a young lady in there, real good girl. And she said, Tom, can I ask a dumb question? I said, sure, we specialize in those. What is it? She said, well, ever since I've been coming here, I've bee hearing about the spiritual side of the program. I said sure. She said what's the other side? And I said, shut up. What have we got? We've got a gaggle of drunks without a spiritual tie to them. So what I valued, one thing I just want to focus on that I valued so much about that attention to the introduction to the program. The guys used that term that's in the book somewhere. I don't know where any of it is, but it's somewhere in there. You can find it. It says, it refers to our program as a design for living. And the first time I heard that, I loved the term because it beat the devil out of trying to figure out the heavenly magic show that would zap Mike and Miss Tom. You know, I never could quite get my hand on that kind of doing tricks stuff. You know? I just couldn't get a hold of that. And so when I heard it, And when the guys talk about design for living, what they said has stuck with me ever since. It's been a long time was that in this program, if we take the actions that are spelled out in the 200 words of the 12 steps, if We Take the Actions, when we finish, we'll be absolutely amazed at what happens because we'll Be a Different Cat. Be a different cat. They said it doesn't even matter about your motives. Who cares about your motifs? I care about the actions. You know, motives will take care of themselves if I take the actions, and I'm telling you that's a fact. That's a fac. But those were words to live by for me, that this is not some hocus-pocus thing. This is a very logical design for living, and I find that enormously important in terms of how we approach the spiritual thing in Alcoholics Anonymous, And that was to be tremendously important to me as I got into the steps. So it was a very good group. That group was the first place I ever learned trust. Strange thing, but 300 guys locked up in a maximum custody penitentiary is the first places I ever learn to trust anybody. I didn't trust a soul. The cleaner they were, the less I trusted them. Didn't trust anybody I was the kind of guy that never would. I know none of you were this way, but I was a kind of person that would never let anybody get close to me. If somebody asked me what kind of a person I am, I'd say, well, I'm a pretty private guy. Oh yeah, you believe I'm a private guy? I am shut down and isolated as can be. I wouldn't let people do stuff for me for a long time, even after I got sober. because you know what happens when somebody does something for you. They get in your knickers if you don't watch it. Yeah, so you've got to hold them off a little bit. And so that was the first place that I ever genuinely learned trust in a good, solid group of alcoholics and anonymous. We weren't just a gaggle of drunks that met and said, let's do something. we had a plan of action and we carried that dude out i saw men you i saw the group do that and i saw men who by their own description had committed acts so cruel that they were unimaginable and yet i watched those self-same men when this program excuse me when this program kicked in, performed acts of kindness and consideration that defied imagination. Now I tell you, you can look at that with any kind of jaundiced eye you want to, but if you don't see spirituality in that, better look a little closer. And that's where I learned the first power that I ever prayed to in my entire life, the first Power that I've ever believed in the first power that i ever prayed to was you know i'd always spent all my time wasted my time trying to draw a picture of god i was trying to picture what god looked like you know what the rules are and how the game played i never did i'd heard all of my life that if you want to find god look within don't look out the window somewhere and so it was tremendously tremendously important when i started looking at the spiritual life to use that freedom that's given you know you see how we approach it you know when you know you're in a heap of trouble and you know that you're beat what do you do come to believe that a power greater than ourselves can restore us to sanity now that's not good news to a guy who's spiritually oriented like me but it is much better news when you say to me, hey Tom, come to believe. Not next Tuesday. You come to believe as you're able to come to belief. Period. Period." And you're free to believe whatever you wish to believe, the only thing I'd advise, be sure you're confident that is capable of saving your life. Be confident of that. But the freedom is there. Enormous freedom, enormous responsibility. Very important to me that I got the hard nose kind of deal and I don't mean people yelling at me or stuff. I mean just the hard nose reality that in this program we don't start out in some kind of ethereal bliss. we start where we are and it makes no difference where that is if it's laying on the floor blowing bubbles go to it we start where we are and it's not about getting good it's about getting well and if goodness comes too bad it just happens sometime i promise you i've gotten better than i ever meant to if i'd have known this was what they were talking about i'd quit no no i don't think i would but anyway you know that's kind of a hard nose reality but God what a freedom and then what that does is it sets up the foundation now I've got an interesting dilemma I have 47 more years to go and I've got just about somewhere around 15 minutes to do it y'all gonna have to listen fast that's the only thing I can tell you let me just kind of allude to what I would talk about if I did have time to talk about. What I've just talked about is what I see in the first three steps of the program, where I admit I'm quip. I come to believe by whatever method that there is a power that can restore me. It's very important for that. And then the third one is just to put that power in motion. If I believe it, do it. Otherwise, what's the point? And what that constitutes is the platform, the foundation from which recovery can occur. I personally don't think that those first three steps really are about recovery as much as it's stopping the bleeding and giving a good solid place to work from. And then what happens is, and I'll just have to hit this real quick, and it looks like I think I'm going to be here for about two months. I turned myself over to Bob Darrell and said, do with me as you will. My wife said, are you crazy? And I even let him book the flight, which told me how long I'm going to be here. I said, I think I'm gonna be here about two months. What that did was give that foundation. And then what happened, the next, let me just bunch it all together, the next four steps to me essentially have to do with coming to understand what am I talking about when I say I'm an alcoholic? What am I talk about? You know, Harmony alluded to it when she was talking a while ago about a real alcoholic, you know, a real alcohol. I guess the other kind is unreal alcoholic. I'm not sure what all that means. I think that's trying to hang on to a little macho, you know, that it's a little more macho to be a real alcoholic. Well, whatever it is, I know that there's a great deal more wrong with me than that I drank too much. I know dat my life was propelled, motivated, driven by forces I didn't understand. We call those things defects of character. And the fourth step and the fifth and sixth and seventh essentially are about real dedicated action to start that process moving the other way. Fourth is about taking a look and see what do I mean when I say I'm an alcoholic and coming to understand that my life, you know, like when I stopped drinking, that battle was over. You know, stopping drinking is not what AA's about. Stop drinking before you come here. And then what the program has designed is then, well, then how do I live with the not drinking? And that's what we do. Now, bottom line, I'm a drunk. I've got a drinking problem. But if I live right and if I keep my spiritual defense in good shape, I won't be troubled with that anymore. and I'll never be bothered with the physical aspect of alcoholism unless I do one thing, that's take a drink. So what do I need to understand? We make a search and fill his moral inventory of ourselves. What is it that's out of whack in this? And some people don't like to get into causation and I'm not tonight but I don't write it off. I don' t write it of. Causation is extremely important for understanding what shapes defects or characters. What is it that makes me walk funny? You know, what is it that makes we get into behaviors that make no sense? You know those are not just casual kinds of things. Those are things that are this program set up to do. And then so four is about that. I'll tell you what happened in four. The product of four when I got through doing that well the first increment of it anyway when I go through I knew at the core of my being that I was alcoholic period. And I have never revisited that for one second since. I knew at a cellular level that I'm an alcoholic, not the young one or the aggravated case or the tragic case. I knew I was alcoholic, period. I'm a guy who can't drink. And that fight was over. And that day I became a solid member of Alcoholics Anonymous. And I Have Never Gone to a Meeting from That Day to This Day, including this one, that I didn't know 100% why I'm there. I'm not here to entertain or cajole or teach or any of that. I'm a man on a mission. I'm the man who believes fervently that there's something powerfully important happens when one alcoholic connects with another, and I'm here to engage in that connection. That's what I'm about. That's What I Do. When I come to A6 and 7, it's about the decision, do I want to change or don't I? I've taken a look. I've looked at the surgery. I've seen what's wrong with this deal. Okay, I understand what's happening, what defects of character I do, I want to change or don't I? Am I willing to take a chance to make a change or aren't I?" Am I willin' to clean up my side of the street? Am I willingly to say no when yes is so easy? It's a growing up, standing up, stepping up to the plate, I think, tremendously important transition. I won't have time to talk about it, but I think maybe Rick and I will talk about it today or maybe Bob and I. But anyway, I was talking to somebody that talked fast. I know that. And I said one thing or two that I think is very true, and I'll just allude to it. But I wish you'd think about it a little bit. When I've worked with people who are really trying to do the program and I lose them, I almost always can trace it back to six and seven because I believe that in 6 and 7 is where we either decide to move into the program of recovery or we opt for an easier, softer way. And the easier, soft way, in my judgment, is getting into the mindset that meetings are the solution, that if I go to enough meetings, everything's going to be okay. And so it creates a kind of a society within Alcoholics Anonymous of what I call pit stop AA, where people think in terms of AA is a place to run in, get what I need, and then get on with my life. And my belief is, why I worry about that, my belief ist based on the time I've looked at it, is that when somebody gets into that, it's going to be, in most cases, going to бытьime limited. It'll only go so far. At a certain point, you're going to hear enough. I mean, how many times can you listen to the same story? How many times Can You Discuss Gratitude? Before long, you've got to get up to your ears in it, and then it starts to get old, and then we get to be missing and stuff like that. So I think there's a huge transition. And then if we very often do what I'm doing to this part of the program right now, we opt out of what turns us loose and makes us free i've had to talk with dave i've had the great privilege in 1965 of going to my first international in toronto where we'll be later this year and my primary motivation i wanted to meet bill wilson and and then in the i didn't want to tell him anything i just wanted to sort of touch his garment you know just know he was there and uh so i did it we had a little tradition meeting i saw him a lot of time in big crowd we had little tradition meetings and you count on a skinny crowd there and so we had uh a little crowd gathered and i sat down and listened to bill talk about some of his his his concerns in aa and some of the things his vision was about and and he said one thing that really struck with me and i and i want to say this and i'll kind of end around this theme And what Bill was saying, he was talking about tradition, he was talk about anonymity. He said AA was never intended to be some furtive hiding place for alcoholics. That's not the function of AA. I mean, hell, this is not about fearful hiding. It's about protecting us from the ego is what that kind of stuff is about. It's not about fear. It's fearful hiding stuff. And he said it was never intend to be that. He said, if I take the actions that are in these steps, just like the guys told me in prison, that if I takethose actions thatare spelled out, the outcome of this program will beto restore me to my rightful place in this world. That's a whole lot different than hanginthereandyoucangetthroughtodaywithoutdrinkin. That's talking about restoration. And key and critical to it is that process of amends. I think that is absolutely the most powerful surgery in all of alcoholic synonymous, where we simply identify the people, places, and things that we've harmed. And then we become willing to set that right. My belief is that I will never be a free man until I search out and make right all of those things that I did to hurt people. If I don't get rid of them, I drag them like an anchor. And he said, when you do that, there will come a day when you'll be able to walk the streets of this earth and meet any person that you see, look them in the eye. And I was right about up to kneecaps right about then. I thought, surely you jest, boy. Today, I can tell you that I go all over this world and there is no place that I know of that I can go that I cannot comfortably look any person that I meet in the eye. Call that what you want to. I call that freedom, real freedom, to be myself. Do not have to play the role. Do not Have to sham. Do not Haver to get into pretense. Be myself. And he said, there'll come a time when you'll be able to say to anybody, and I'd say it to you, ask me anything you want to ask me. I don't have anything to hide. If I got something that's helpful, it's yours. That's where the joy comes. that's where the freedom comes so I can breathe free and inhale the joys of life and where I can find a place to be usefully of service in the world around here and the result of that is I got into an unbelievable profession and with very little ambition and not a whole lot of ability just a lot of spiritual guidance I wound up at the very top of my profession Now, I'm unemployed. It's a pitiful story. Pitiful story, and I've never been busier in my life, and I am having a hoot. So what I'm telling you is not some tale of woe. What I'm tellin' you is I don't care what your situation. I don' care how bad you think it is. You're sitting in the middle of somethin' that's strong enough to bring you out of that sucker and give you a life that you won't believe. Thank you.