The Need for a Higher Power Over the Proof of One – Sandy B.

Well, good evening everybody. My name is Sandy Beach and I'm an alcoholic. How are you all doing out here? Great. I think this is terrific that you've got this organized and come back to share each other's recovery. Let's check up on how each other is doing and share a you see stories about how it's been because there's something wonderful um you know about coming back and seeing people that you got started with it's like going through boot camp or something you know you that first month or two is a rare experience and hopefully we won't ever have to go through it again and those that were in your crowd uh it's a pretty close bond and and it's kind of nice to come back and see the proofs of sobriety in the program and caring for each other. And so on that, I'm just delighted to be part of this thing, and I'm especially happy to see my old friend Jack out here and to have Margaret J. ask me to come over, and I'd be glad to do any time she wants a favor done. and I'll be happy to do it. So tonight we're going to have some fun. I think talking about AA is fun. And when I first came in, somebody told me, if you were in AA and you weren't happy, you were doing it wrong. That's a pretty heavy-duty statement that sounds, what do you mean? I don't have a job. I don' t have this. Well, you're doing it right. You're doing something wrong. That's my opinion because this is an amazing program, And if you haven't really gotten a grasp of it yet, then you just don't realize the full impact of the program of recovery. It would be kind of like if somebody came up to you back in the old days and said to you, You know, I drink a lot, but I never get drunk. What would you say? I know what I'd say. You're doing it wrong. No such thing as drinking enough and not getting drunk. Let me watch you drink. And then I'd sit there and watch. And if I watched and poured enough in there, that guy would get drunk because there's that much power in alcohol and we all know it. You just got to do it right. You got to get it in there and pour it down. And there's a heck of a lot more power in AA than there is in vodka. And so it's just a question of you're not letting it in, not doing it right or it would be inside there giving us a different view of the world. And I really believe that's what sobriety is all about, and that's why drinking was all about. Very briefly, I don't really want to talk about a drunk-a-log. I'd rather talk about AA and recovery. But just very briefly, I came into AA on December 7th of 1964. So if I can hang in a couple more months or something like that, then I will have been in here for 25 years. So that's amazing. Thank you. It's absolutely astounding. I can't believe that that much time has gone by and I'm still so young. It just seems, oh, I'm getting more to relate to Dr. Hal Marley, you know, when he says he wakes up in the morning and feels like springing out of bed but knows better. At any event, I did come in here. I was in the Marine Corps very briefly. I drank for about 14 years, not very long by many standards, but I did a thorough job. Once I started, I just kept at it every day. I didn't waste any time. And I came in as a result of having, during my last year of drinking, I had malnutrition and finally it got to the daily drinking and losing weight and not eating led to a convulsion, the seizure, was checked into the hospital. They didn't have any alcohol programs, so after I was there a week and I went into the DTs, then I was put into the nut ward, and I stayed there for six months, and it was during that stay that Alcoholics Anonymous talked their way into the Bethesda Naval Hospital and brought a meeting in, and that's where I went to my first meeting. Now that I reflect on alcohol and alcoholism and so on down. I agree with a lot of other speakers, Clancy in particular, that my problem, while on the surface may have looked like my problem was alcohol, it really wasn't in a strange way. My problem was sobriety. Every time I was sober, it was awful. I wanted to be un-sober. And the way I got there was with alcohol. But the real problem was, every time I sobered up and walked around sober, it was terrible. I was terrified. I couldn't make a decision. I couldn' t function. The world was closing in on me. And boy, I just didn' t like being sober at all. So when people said to me, you ought to not drink, I would say to them, you don' t know what you' re talking about because if I don' T drink, I' m just going to be sober all the time. and I need help. I need help from this thing called sobriety. I can't stand being sober, so boy. So, you know, when you're sober there's no alcohol in your system. So if there's not alcohol in the system how can your problem be alcohol? You know what I'm saying? Now alcohol caused me some problems, but it really that wasn't what was going on. Because as far as I was concerned, alcohol was fixing more problems than it was causing. And so I look back on it and I realize that what made me different from the non-alcoholics really wasn't what alcohol did to me but what it did for me. It did things for me that it didn't do for the non‑alcoholic. It was literally a higher power in my life. When it came in, before I took my first drink, I was standing in a room a little smaller than this. I come from New Haven, Connecticut, and I was in the local university there, one of the townies going to school there, and I hadn't had a drink until I got to college. I was about 19, and halfway through my freshman year and it was really unusual to not be drinking, but I was brought up a Catholic and somewhere they told me that if you didn't drink until you were 21, you got like a quarter of a million years off in purgatory. And I needed that and many more. I just had the cash register on sinning was going off in my head and that stuff was piling up and God was waiting to get me and all that wonderful guilt stuff. And so I was just coasting along, putting money in the bank, figuring I'd get this quarter of a million years. I don't remember what the deal was, but this, I never made it because halfway through that year, why, it was very unusual not to be drinking. Everybody else was drinking and you know how peer pressure is. And soon I found myself reconsidering my position and maybe I ought to have one drink, you know, and then I'll only get 239,000 years off or something like that. But I remember the evening extremely well and it wasn't so much that alcohol made me feel better when I had that drink. I was in a room with 40 or 50 other guys and we were supposed to meet each other, you know one of those things. I still don't do this too well but I'm much better than I used to be. And I never could figure out what to say. I could never think of anything extemporaneously to say to people, you know, like, Hi, my name is Sandy. Nice moon tonight, huh? And that was it, you Know, and the guys say, Yeah, and then there'd be 10 minutes of silence. Probably be a nice sun tomorrow, right? Yeah, probably will. Well, I guess that's about it for me. You know what I mean? it just there was no gift to gab there was no relating to people and there was no sense of belonging and I didn't know how people knew intuitively how to walk into little groups I went from group to group looking for a signal that that was my group and got no signal I got people looking at me wondering why I was staring at their group so I moved on to the next group hoping that I'll probably fit in here somewhere no that's not my group either and all of a sudden you've circled the whole room and you don't belong anywhere and I was getting ready to walk out the door you know well nobody in this room wants to meet me and that's when I had my first drink and I had one and then I had another one and I sort of sat there waiting wondering what this great magic was that everybody was talking about and to this day I don't honestly recall that alcohol did anything to me but uh when I looked back at the people in that room, it was as if they had taken that sort of hostile crowd that was there 15 minutes earlier, ushered them out the door and replaced them with 50 of the friendliest guys you have ever seen in your life. They were all looking at me, the different groups, probably eight or nine groups. They had stopped talking to each other. They're all looking at me going, please come over to our group. Please come over. Hey, you'll have to take your turn i'm going to start over here and you'll just wait and i just schmoozed around told a couple jokes over here went over there went overthere and in 10 or 15 minutes i had met everybody there was just you know i could sit i could think up stuff to say so fast it was just amazing it was almost like the promises in our big book i intuitively knew how to handle situations that used to baffle me. I didn't, you know, I just, 15 minutes ago all I could say is big moon tonight, isn't it? And boy, I was just around and I knew how to mix and it was like I was energized and the more I got relating to alcohol, the more it was and the longer I felt that that's what it was. I always knew there was something missing in my life. Alcohol, that's What Was Missing in My Life. I was like a battery, you know you buy a battery and you won't start your car until you pour water in it. Then it is ready to function and I suddenly realized, hey, I've been running around with the missing ingredient. No wonder I've had such a hard time and I'm frightened and I can't make decisions. You're not supposed to be able to get along in this world on your own. You know? You're supposed to need something. And I had discovered not what other people thought about alcohol. I had recovered the secret to life. That's what I had discovered in this alcohol. Now, kidding around, I talked to some of my friends in later years after I got an AA who are not alcoholics but who I was drinking with back in the 50s and I asked them about alcohol and I always loved their answers. Do you ever sit somebody down that you grew up with and you say, look, just off the record if you had to describe alcohol what would you say about it? You're a guy, you've been drinking for 35, 40 years. How would you describe alcohol to someone maybe who had never had any? And then I listened to their answers. And I'm always amused by the first answer is, oh, alcohol makes food taste better. Now, have you ever thought that yourself? I mean, anybody in here? Boy, when somebody asks you, you know, what was drinking to you? Is that your first answer? Oh, it made food taste better. That's one of the main reasons I drank. It made food tastes better. And I'm sitting there saying to myself, going down or coming up, you know? Made food taste bitter. That's the strangest thing I ever heard. And then they went on and said, well, that's not the only thing about alcohol. Alcohol also is wonderful. you get through a day's work, you come home and you have a drink, maybe a half a drink. Did you ever hear him say that? Maybe a half a drink and take a shower and it just sort of lets you put the work day behind you and then you can go in and visit with the family and watch, have dinner and go to bed. And then every so often I have friends over and we'll get some drinks and everybody sort of loosens up and we have a little bit of fun. And that's their description of alcohol, but none of them ever said, I never heard any of them say, alcohol is the secret of life. They never said that, but a lot of us say that. Boy, alcohol was our ticket. It was what we had faith in. It was my higher power. I had absolute faith in alcohol. As long as I could have access to it, i felt comfort i felt um safe if i even if i had the money in my wallet how many of us when we come into a.a i remember this i got rid of all the booze you remember that old joke about the guy got so carried away uh when he went to his first a.m meeting went home poured all the booze in the house down the toilet and three weeks later he flushed it yes you remember okay it's hard to make that last severance you know with the with the thing and so i can remember the first two or three months walking around with a 50 bill in a secret compartment in my wallet that i just it was just there i had all the booze was out of the house but this was like just in case you know what i mean i mean this program, an emergency came along that AA couldn't handle. And my sponsor and all these nosy guys that were messing around in my life. Uh, and just in case that they couldn't manage something, you gotta protect yourself. And I had this secret money in my wallet and I could race down and get some vodka. You know what I mean? So I still hadn't cut that last cord, um, in my mind with relying on alcohol. That's how strong this relationship was. It was truly a dependence on a power greater than myself known as, eventually ended up being vodka and I had great faith in it and it did something and it didn't work. It did something rather wonderful. Alcohol really was my friend. I got a lot of great memories of alcohol. They're not all bad. I got lots of great stories. I ended up in the Marine Corps and became a jet pilot and went over flying in fighter squadrons. And boy, we got some great stories I can tell you about going out to town in Japan in the 50s with a bunch of guys and flying airplanes and going out and raising hell. And it was something else. I mean, you wouldn't have been able to slow me down with a bulldozer back in those years. I mean it was just full speed ahead and drinking was part of it and I loved it and it was all so a very central part of my life. And I look back now and I realize that flying airplanes and being in the Marine Corps and so on down was really a hobby of mine and my full-time job was being an alcoholic. That was the full-term job and that was the whole-time thing because this thing occupied center stage. I was always manipulating and maneuvering and lying and making up stories to either cover up or get access to booze because it was so important in my life. I could not imagine going through life without booze. As time went on, the trouble got worse, the drinking got worse and there came a time when I no longer could fly. It was after about 12 years of flying. Now, I never drank during the day. There was some rule that you wouldn't drink But sometimes we'd get in at 6 a.m. from partying all night, and we'd getting the airplanes at 8, which is only two hours later, but it seemed to look like it was a different day. You know what I mean? You passed out for an hour, and then you got up, and you went, ho-ho, a day. But if they had smelled your breath, you know, there's rot got just reeking out of there. But as far as I was concerned, I didn't drink and fly. And so I would wait, you know, until the end of the work day. And so as a result, in that last six months of flying, I was there on Cherry Point, North Carolina, in a Crusader photo squadron, and I was having withdrawal symptoms in the plane. These were real. I would have been a much safer pilot to be drinking in the airplane than to be having withdrawals because those are bad news things. I mean, I was losing vision, having heart palpitations, extreme sweating, and just, you know, I couldn't hardly see the instrument panel. Then my eyes would clear up. And so I had lots of challenges that weren't in the handbook for the F-8 Crusader. Like, what do you do if you feel like you're going to pass out? I don't ever remember seeing that anywhere in the book and yet I was faced with this challenge alcoholics do face problems that lots of other people don't face there wasn't anything in the handbook about throwing up in an oxygen mask it's a great thrill for those of you that haven't tried it just think about it for a second what I would suggest is don't throw up a lot in an hydrogen mask If you're going to throw up, throw up just a little bit and not a lot. And anyway, I tell this story. My solution to passing out while flying a single engine jet airplane is you just put one hand on the ejection curtain and get a death grip. And then if you pass out, the forward motion will fire you out of the plane and the chute opens automatically and you float down to earth. And I remember going, getting real smug with that solution, you know. They thought they had me trapped, didn't they? But I figured that one out too. It was like some sort of congratulatory sense came over me. Like, boy, I was almost trapped there for a second. Now I'm in pretty good shape. You know, like punch out of the plane. Here goes a million bucks. You have to explain this whole thing. That didn't bother me. I had figured this out. Well, in any event, there came a time when I went to the doctors, told them that I was having all these problems, and they agreed we had big problems. Sent me off for a two-week evaluation in Pensacola, Florida with a special board of flight surgeons who eventually took me off of flying. And they looked at me, and I was looked at from head to toe for 14 days by every kind of a specialist there was. and they couldn't find anything physically wrong so they left it up to the psychiatrist to determine what my problem was and I had, you know my eyes were bloodshot I had high blood pressure I sweat all the time alcohol a couple doctors mentioned alcohol on his breath the dentist in particular you know I'm sitting in the chair and he's looking and he said boy have you been drinking and I said yes oh And he just went on working on the teeth. So we had the alcohol on the breath, the trembling hands, the high blood pressure, the sweating, the shaking, all these episodes in airplanes. And the psychiatrist wrote it up, and I still have the records on this, childhood fear of flying. This was the... This guy never should have made it through the screening process. and after 12 years of flying it finally came out that he didn't like it at all up there and so I was taken off like that terrible crushing ego blow because that was my whole macho identity and now I was this nothing and the Marine Corps had to decide what to do with a guy who was in such bad shape that he couldn't fly airplanes and just to show you how back in the dark ages everybody had a problem they retrained me as an air traffic controller and now I'm bringing airplanes in in bad weather when they can't see the runway you remember how you're driving in traffic and you see two white lines down the middle and you just cover one eye and then you drive so you can see it works the same thing on a radar screen when you just have when you see two runways down the cover up one eye and bring them on in so anyway i feel very lucky that nobody got killed no big accidents or anything as a matter of fact as time went on i was sent overseas and i became the officer in charge of this radar thing and they wouldn't let me near the radar, the people that worked for me. They said, Captain, your job, your main job each day is to try and find your way to work, not fall off your bicycle and find you're way back to the Quonset huts at night and I couldn't manage that too well. I would get lost and fall off the bike and so on down. So that was my last year drinking. Now I wasn't flying so I could drink around the clock and that's when I got into the malnutrition and I lost 50 pounds over what I weigh today in that last year, and that led to the convulsion and DTs and all that got me into the hospital. So there's the type of alcoholic that I was. And when I was ordered to my first AA meeting by the corpsman in the nut ward, came in and said, all drunks fall in, right, praise. That's how I got to that meeting. and at the end of the meeting I remember saying to myself isn't this interesting I mean it was almost like I was a third party observer to this and I went up to the red headed guy he's still red F from the Bethesda area and I said you know sir you've got a very interesting program I was fascinated by your stories and if I ever run into a guy with a drinking problem I'm going to send him around here I mean I was absolutely convinced that once I got back out having gone through this terrible experience, that I would just control the drinking. But I certainly wasn't going to stop. That just never occurred to me to stop and so out of that came a poke in the chest like the good old Buck D did around the Northern Virginiary for a number of years and Red said, let me ask you one question. Which one of us is going to get in his car, drive on home to his family and which one of us is going to go upstairs in his little blue bathrobe and get locked up like an animal. And I remember saying to myself, God damn, I just met this guy, and he's talking this way. And, of course, this is Alcoholics Anonymous. You know what I mean? I'm sure all of you have run into that. It's called hard love, telling the truth, speaking as it is. No more pretending that you don't see what's right in front of your eyes like society seems to do with this illness. Buck had the greatest line about smelling booze on somebody's breath. You ever come into that and you've been around somebody, been in the program a while, now you're sitting next to them, you smell booze? What do you do? You go, well, God, the guy's in the programme, he's sober, how could I be smelling boozes? Probably using sober is the answer. Anyway, Buck had a great line. He would just turn to whoever it was, didn't matter if he'd never met him before, and you just go, one of us has been drinking. To the best of my knowledge, it isn't me. And we just call a shot, you know what I mean? Like, bam. And so AA is intensely practical. I was to find out when I called after I got out of there and got a sponsor, who the sponsor was the guy, you didn't have to go out and get him in those days. you called intergroup and somebody came to your house you see i went back out and drank again as soon as i got out of the hospital for a week and i knew i was in trouble so that that's when i made my call to aa and that's was in december of 1964 and so this great big guy got the call from the northern virginia intergroup came down to my house in quantico virginia and just came into the doorway and he was like this big and he just filled the doorway it was a crew cut right? Marine captain, just, and he just went, hi, my name is Bill. This is a 12-step call. I talk, you listen. Bad problem here. Bad choice. And so you didn't get to choose your sponsor. Your sponsor was like ordained in heaven. He just came to the door when you called. It was the first guy that showed up uh now we have to choose them that's a that's a terrible process i think we ought to put all the names in a hat and draw them out and then it still would look like it was ordained in heaven you know what i'm talking about and there you wouldn't be involved in it but we'll never get to that um anyway this guy just came in took over get in the car said something about going to a meeting every night for 10 years and I desperately wanted out of this meeting I wanted out of this guy I just wanted I said could you leave some literature that was the just drop it off and I'll read it and study it for now we'll be on a wood lawn on this night and Saturday night we'll see you we'll over here in Annandale that was Annandales Saturday night we're down here at Quantico go out to manassas on this night i mean you had to really travel back in the early 60s to get to a meeting and so he's talking all this insanity and then on top of that we go to this manassus meeting and i didn't know it but it was a group anniversary kind of like this wonderful celebration here tonight and they had several people celebrating anniversaries speedy b is still out there and uh pete n and pinky and those guys and they were celebrating probably five or six or seven years at that time and after the meeting they had a buffet ham and turkey and chicken and baked beans and salad and all this wonderful stuff and that was followed by a square dance that went on till 12 30 well i wasn't eating and i certainly wasn't dancing i just want to get out of there and go home and see if I could find some vodka that I had hidden in some Coke bottles on the back porch to make it look like rainwater. You know what I mean? That was my secret hiding place. You know how you put empty Coke bottles out on the bank? The back porch and the screen and the rain comes in and I went out and put this much vodka in the bottom of 50 Coke bottles knowing that nobody would... You know, and the funny thing was nobody was looking for my booze. Nobody ever stole it. My wife didn't steal it. I just was worried about it. You start going paranoid. I'd hide it under my underwear, and then I'd come back and be gone. I'd ask my wife, what happened here? So I found it under your underwear. I put it in the liquor cabinet. Well, I never would have looked there. So nobody was stealing it, but I was hiding it. I was real nervous about that. So I wanted to get home and get that buck, and we're there until 12.30. And all these people coming up and going, hi, hi. You're new. Boy, when you showed up new back then, there hadn't been a new person in a couple months, so the word went around, new guy, new guy. New guy, everybody came over. How are you? How are your heart? You don't want to talk to anybody. You don' t want to look at anybody. You just want to get out of there. You've only been sober seven hours. And so on the way home, he's talking about we'll be going here tomorrow night we'll be going there and we'll go in there and this and that and I had no way of knowing that all meetings didn't last six hours and with dances and parties as a cheese I don't know how these people put up so I tried my best to get out of the deal when he pulled up in front of my house and I walked around and he saw I wanted to talk to him he had his window down and I'd rehearsed this in my head on the way home from Manassas and I was gonna tell him I had six kids and their birthdays were coming up starting tomorrow i was i was lying a little bit but it was an emergency so the next six nights i was tied up with kids birthdays then it was our anniversary my birthday my wife's birthday and i had these what i considered absolutely legitimate excuses for not going to aa for the next two weeks and then i figured he'd forget about me and move on but when you've been sober 12 hours which is about how long I was when we got home sometimes your brain isn't working quite right and I got this all rehearsed and got out and stood by the window and he's looking at me and I've got my finger and I'm going but nothing is coming out it's like I said it all in the brain left there to go to the mouth and never got there It's just, I'm, you know, and he looks at me for a while. Finally, he says, don't you take a drink and I'll pick you up tomorrow night at 730. He's gone. And probably 15 seconds later, here it comes. I won't be going to that meeting tomorrow night. I got the birthdays and I'm talking this whole thing out there and there's no one there. And I think my family was looking out the front door and I'm talking up a storm to no one and their faith in AA went down a great deal after that. But anyway, there it is. That was a long time ago. The guy did come back the next night and I did get in the car and I didn't drink and everything I saw in AA looked stupid. You know, if you're smart like everybody in this room is this stuff looks stupid. I mean, when you're small you're not smart you're just sort of intellectually superior to the average person which is why you drink in low-class bars so that they will have the privilege of associating once in their life with this type of an individual I mean you know I mean in that wonderful feeling you sit in the bar and look in the mirror and make a few rings with your glass hi guy man what a guy what a aren't these other customers lucky that I'm here and then just about then they cut you off. But in any event, this program started and all these things look so stupid. Easy does it. You know, like, wow, the first drink gets you drunk. Oh boy, give me a break. The first drink gets me drunk. There but for the grace of God. What does that mean? It meant nothing to me coming in here. And just, you know, one day at a time. Ha, one Day at a Time. I knew that. I used to drink one day at a time and that was my philosophy drinking i sit at the bar and go eat drink and be married tomorrow you may be dead which was drinking one day at a so i knew all this stuff and i just was going and i don't know about you but this is what was going on in my mind when they would say now our second step uh came to believe that a power great i'm going yeah yeah yeah that stuff's very interesting academic When you get old, you're about to die. This stuff could be important to learn. But right now, I don't see any of the steps addressing my problems. You know what I mean? I agreed that they held some value in the overall scheme of things, but they had no connection to my problem. What I wanted somebody to say was, step two is where we give you a $2,000 loan. That's what I needed. top priority in my first year of sobriety was a two thousand dollar if i had a two thousand dollar loan i would have most of my life straightened out that's how i saw it as i looked at life i just needed to get this guy off my back i needed this i needed a new uniform then i'd look better and then i could do this and so i saw this as a very high priority getting this a lump sum of money and I used to fantasize about the millionaire show where the guy came to my door hey you got sober here Mr. Anthony's been watching you and he's very pleased you've got three months sobriety here's your check for one million dollars that was sort of what I saw a spiritual program ought to look like you know what I mean if there was a God where's the check check arrives i start believing in god that's sort of uh the level of viewpoint that i had well life went along and i'm doing all these stupid things i'm just going to these meetings i'm sitting on these little chairs in the smoky basement the topic is resentment and we go around the room well i feel about resentment and i am listening and iam going home and you know after about six months of this, I had a real freak accident happen. Um, I was sitting home thinking to myself and I said to myself, geez, you forgot to worry about drinking last month. I remember saying that to myself. You forgot to hurry up out drinking last month. And I remember being startled by that because the first time in 15 years that I hadn't obsessed about drinking. I mean, that thought was up here. I figured it was going to be there forever. And here, I forgot to do it. I almost was going to make a little note to myself. Hey, don't forget to worry about drinking This is so unlike you to have forgotten to worry About Drinking. Little did I realize that may be one of the greatest miracles that ever happens to alcoholics. When we follow the directions in this program, We get these incredible results, only sometimes we don't see the cause and effect. We don't really see the connection between listening to a stupid sponsor who doesn't know his way out of a cardboard box and reading these 12 steps that don't have any money in them, no hint about any money, that don'T even address all the idiots in the world. They DON'T even talk about all the harassment and injustice that has been heaped upon us and the unfair bosses and colonels and neighbors and society and the country and everything that's so unfair. It doesn't even talk about that. It just keeps focusing on me as if I'm part of the problem. You know what I mean? I mean, we know what the problem is. We've been keeping inventories all our lives. It's this guy, that guy, that guy got promoted, I didn't. Look at this jerk. Why could they let him? it's amazing anyway so i'm just following this stuff i didn't have anywhere else to go and i forgot to worry about drinking last month well i'll tell you that is something when that happens we're talking about freedom now when i'm not totally consumed with worrying about drinking and where that next drink is i have been given one of the greatest gifts that will be given to an alcoholic and i just i thought that it might have been just a coincidence that it probably was going to happen anyway and you know that's a lot of things that'll happen to us we could attribute to coincidence because if i don't contribute attributed to coincidence i might start having to think about god and bringing him into the picture and i certainly didn't want to bring god into the figure i had all those old ideas about this higher power and i had um a great fear of this thing they talked about, turn your life over to God. Well, when I imagined doing that, our third step or our entire program, as far as that goes, all I saw was boredom. I mean, I just went, turn your wife over. You'd be like the most boring life in the world. You know, do you ever think of what the straight and narrow is? That was what I envisioned as a kid growing up. There was the straight and narrow. Now, I knew what happened on the straight and narrow. If you followed the straight and narrow, you succeeded. You know what I'm talking about? They told me in grammar school how to study and if you went home and you studied 15 minutes every night for each class that you had that day, you will get all A's and I conceded that. I said, right, but what are the outer limits of some of these things? How many classes can you skip and still pass? You know what I mean? i i acknowledge that this stuff if you did this you did get those results but people who did that were they were like wimps you know what i mean they were they Were just not the action people weren't doing that they weren't out rolling somebody or getting drunk over here or over in the bushes and you know i mean They were out here just going down the straightener so i never saw any value in being there and then as i got older and everything like that i thought about sobriety and the straight and narrow this was a guy he got up in the morning he went to work worked all day long worked real hard at the end of the day got in his car went straight home his own home just didn't drink anything and just went hello family i'm home and we'll have supper tonight and i'll talk to all of you and then we'll go to bed and you know what he did the next day exactly the same just went went to working worked hard all day came home hi family i am here well we will talk to you and you and you now I'm going to bed at night and I just went god damn can you imagine having like hundreds of days like that in a row just I mean I just looked at that and I went oh my god wouldn't that be awful if you were stuck with the straight and narrow so I knew that this was would guarantee to produce good results but I didn't want any part of it and all I saw with getting God in the act was more straight and narrow and I just saw 50 years of boredom just nothing happening you know what i mean dullsville so i was willing to believe that all of this stuff but i had a better system you know the smarter people always have an angle to shoot and my angle was go ahead and have as much fun as you can and just before you die straighten out now isn't that smarter than being bored to death all your life and then you know because you both end up in the same place you straighten out just at the last possible moment little did i know what i was missing little did I had no vision of the wonderful joy that is contained in spiritual progress and attempting to just as Bill puts in our big book trudge the happy road of destiny you know trudging sounds like something I don't want be involved in i saw no value in this and so i never tried it and this is the funny thing about our program we can't see any of these things until we do them you know if somebody had told you tried to convince you that if you went every night to a smoky church basement from 8 30 to 9 30 it would be a lot of fun i mean i could tell you that and say look at anything and you would not but now how many of you have done it and you have your favorite little group you can hardly wait to get there and then you try and tell your friends about what do you do down there what do we do there from 8 30 tonight well we all get a cup of coffee good good that's that's great hi hi and then we sit down and then somebody reads the how it works and then he says his name we all say his name back hi fred i see sounds really exciting so far why don't you uh why don't you keep telling me what else happens in there? Well, then he might think up something like the fourth step, taking an inventory. And then each of us share for four or five minutes, two minutes, whatever we think about that. And then we say the Lord's Prayer and go home. Jeez, that's really neat. So you try and describe this to people and to any of us ahead of time and it just sounds like that isn't the answer to my problem. I keep telling you, I need 2,000 bucks. You're telling me to go down in the room. There's no connection up here. So we are taking action that makes no sense to us and we get the results. And the reason that we're taking this action is we don't have any other choice. That's the wonderful thing. What we got forced into was a spiritual program. we got forced into a program that's going to bring us closer to our higher power that is going to put value into our lives that is going to change the way the entire world looks will suddenly be part of something we'll understand where we're going life will make sense the walking down the straight and narrow will become absolutely exciting we'll be able to see it as if we were given a new pair of eyes chuck c wrote that wonderful book a new pair of glasses which is exactly what i think sobriety is here is this world that looks so confusing and so on absolutely unfathomable and all of a sudden we've been given a vision so that we see the people and we go god these are wonderful people in this world just like that room that night when they took those other people out and then they brought in these wonderful people and so this is called our spiritual condition there's the wonderful thing about what we have is a daily reprieve dependent on our spiritual condition. As long as I have this condition, and I've gone in and brought in this power that gives me this particular view of things, I'm going to have that perspective on life. And when I have that, sobriety is wonderful. But it's only there a day at a time. If I stop my little meditation 24-hour day book, calling up people going to a meeting it's like the battery getting drained all of a sudden this stuff starts flowing out of me and i start looking at the world and it starts getting real gray and people start getting dull and you hear people talking about aa and they go you know the meetings are as exciting as they used to be their batteries getting low it's getting dangerous it's coming down i don't know just life is a real drag again and pretty soon guess what's going to look appealing a drink because we know that drinking has the power to bring life back into technical and exciting the way we want it to be and so does the spiritual power and so we have our choice of those, too. And that's what this program is. In closing, I know that the spiritual part, the God, the higher power, is always the greatest struggle when we're new. And the funny thing about Alcoholics Anonymous is we don't have a God here that we can tell anybody about. There is no AA God. It's a spiritual program, not a religious program, So there is no God for Alcoholics Anonymous. Each person in this room who has conducted a search and has taken certain steps may have their own higher power that they could share with you, and in some cases you will find out it's sort of a religious god. Then you may talk to somebody over on this side of the room, and they say, well, it's part of the spirit of the universe. Somebody else may say, Well, it is sort of AA and its principles. You may get 100 different definitions as you go around this room, but what we all have in common and what AA really focuses on is the fact that there is an absolute need for a God. That's what our whole program says to you as a new person. It basically says, you are in deep crap. And unless there's a higher power, you're going under. That is the nature of your situation. Do you understand that? I see, I'm in deep trap, and unless there's a higher power, I'm going under. Yes. And then that's what we focus on that first step. Come on, let's go. Let's talk about your life. You're not in deep crap? Let's call your family and see if he's in deeper crap than he knows. I'm not going to tell you that. We haven't even told him what the doctor said. So it's there and you're going down. You're in quicksand. You're going under unless there is a higher path or power. You're gone. You're down for the third time and that's it. And that's when we say to you, Do you believe in God? And it's under those conditions that you sometimes are willing to reconsider your previous position on this matter. And so we never prove the existence of it, we simply try to prove the need for it. And once you have been convinced of the need for it, you're open to the existence that's been there all along. And that's what surrendering is. Your situation becomes so hopeless, you have to surrender to the idea that maybe there is a higher power. We go, okay, higher power, okay. What do I do to get a higher power? Well, that's what these steps are all about. First, and then we just plow through them. And so there is this important element in understanding the true nature of your situation. If you do understand the true nature of the situation, there's no debate about the higher power. So it's always going back to that first step. People who've had a problem in the program have never taken a full first step They've just come in here, and without telling anybody, they've said to themselves, I'm different than everybody else. I'm a semi-alcoholic. I have a sort of a mild case of alcoholism compared to these other people. Yeah, I have an alcohol problem, but I'm not like an alcoholic. See, because as soon as you get over here, then the only thing that can save you is a higher power. and so I never want to be that bad because I don't want a higher power in my life. So there was the great debate and then having surrendered in that first step we begin this thing is there going to be a higher power for me which takes place in the second step and that's the last thing I want to talk about and this is an incredible debate and my favorite example about this was the story about myself when I remember being a little kid I was probably 12, 13 something like that and I was in the Boy Scouts for one year out in this little town in Connecticut. And I've got a little uniform, and I went there, and one of the first things that the scoutmaster talked about was the compass. And he brought a compass out like this watch that I have up here, and he handed everybody one, and he said, This will save your life. This little thing here has the power to save your Life if you're ever totally lost in the woods. And the way this works is you open this thing up, and you push this button, and there's a needle in there, and this needle points to the North Pole. So somebody said, what's the North pole? It's this big rock up at the Northpole and it has all this power and this noodle points at it. And I don't remember anybody in the room going, rock at the North Pole! And that needle points at it, give me a break! Let's go up to the north, I want to see the rock, I mean you think I'm going to go out and take this god damn thing in the woods and if I don' t get out this freaking needle is supposed to point in the rock at the north boy what a load of crap that is no we just went hey great i'll stake my life on that i'll go out there i got no food if i'm not out of here you know all around what's to worry i got this thing i got this map i just hit the button this thing north right there okay i just took that thing hook line and sinker put my life right on the line later on i'm flying the same thing they said hey you're in the airplane there's all this fog you can't see big mountain right out there somewhere but trust us there's this invisible radio beam coming up behind the mountain comes right up to your plane if you find it you listen you can go and when you come down there'll be a runway down there not a mountain oh really i didn't go into Who invented the radio beam? How do you know the beam is anything? I just took it, that this power existed. I could put my life on the line. So we have this tremendous faith in things you can't see or understand all the time, especially that compass thing. And we come in here and we go, Here's these 12 steps. There is this higher power. If you will do these things, you will be guided along through your life to exactly where you're supposed to be. Everything will make sense. and we go, oh, I can't buy that. I can'T buy that, I CAN'T buy that. And that's the wonderful... Now see, every human being has this. Every human being is faced with these types of questions. This is the gift that the alcoholic has over everybody else. The other people have the option of using a compass or not, of going with a higher power or not. They don't have a fatal illness that unless they sign up and get on board today they're going under and so we have the motivation we are pushed we are have our choice almost taken away from us and force us to try the path that if we had a free choice on we might not have chosen and so when i get up here and say that i'm glad i'm an alcoholic not that i'M IN A.A. I'M GLAD I'M AN ALCOHOLIC because it forced me down a road I might not have chosen if I hadn't been an alcoholic. And that road took me to places I never dreamed existed. The greatest gift you, as a new person, are going to get is you. It's coming up to Christmas time and just think of yourself as a package that's never really been unwrapped. And these 12 steps are going start taking that string away and we're going to open up one of the most beautiful gifts you've ever seen which is you! Most alcoholics think very low of themselves especially with the past records that we all bring in here but as you get a good sponsor gets going to these meetings and start through these steps you're gonna find out what a precious loving caring wonderful person you are and it's been hidden down inside of that garbage all these years the thing that was the most painful for the alcoholic was to be living a life in conflict with what they really want it to be deep down inside that's why we think of killing ourselves is we don't want to be that way there's something fundamentally wonderful inside of each one of us that wants to get out of there and we never knew how to get there we never know how to take the steps to unwrap and find this wonderful thing and this program just the last thing I want to say you may have already seen a glimpse of this even the most cynical of you think you're I don't care I'm just one of these tough mean currently all of that and yet you've been in sober maybe a month and then on your 30th day you were at a meeting and some guy or gal came in in their first day and you looked over there and saw yourself you said Jesus that's how I looked a month ago God and all of a sudden you were it wasn't just you were looking at this person comparing you felt your heart get tugged and something deep inside of you said God I hope they make it I really hope they make it and then they went home and they didn't show so you don't come around until the following week so you had a whole week to wonder whether that person made it and the next week you're there and they're not there and about five minutes after the meeting starts they come wandering in and you just inside you just went yay god damn they were you were like a cheerleader you're just so damn happy this person hadn't even met him yet don't even know their name and you're going yay and after me you went over you said boy i'm glad you made it and they're going what what the hell is all this about well what was that well who is this person that's doing this what is that all about what is that all about that part of you that felt that strong you hadn't felt that about a human being you didn't know it was in there well that is what AA is going to go after that's the part of us human beings that this program is goingto polish up develop mature and that's what sobriety is all about and that'swhat AA is all about and I'll tell you I look at all these balloons I lookat all these happy faces and I say it's worth celebrating and I'm delighted to be part of it tonight. Thanks.