The Quality of Questions That Keep You Up at Night 😆 – Steve L.

Thank you, Jerry, for those kind words. Good evening, everyone. I'm Steve Lee. I'm an alcoholic. And yeah, I'm really glad that it worked out that this was virtual, at least for me, and that I could be here. And I'm always pleased to be invited to do something with the Primary Purpose Group, as I have many times. But also know there are a number of folks on here from all around the country, at least those of you that are coming in on Zoom. So anyway, thanks for having me. And as Jerry said, I've spoken at this meeting a few times and certainly I see some people on this screen that have had the misfortune of hearing me many times. And so I don't know what version of my story you will hear tonight. You know, as someone says that the facts of our stories don't change. That's certainly true. But my perception of those facts often change over time. And the other thing that's true is that, you know, one of the things I've thought a lot about lately is not being held captive to my story. And what I mean by that is for a lot of years now, I've been given a 50-minute version of my story, what it was like, right? What happened, what I'm like now. And sometimes it's like being a one-hit wonder, you know? Sometimes it's likes having that one song that you keep singing over and over, and I know the words to the song, But sometimes I get disconnected from my relationship to that because it has been told so often. And so I have always tried to not get too caught up in that. And sometimes I'll take a left or right turn during this talk, and who knows if I'll ever get back to center. But my intention is to, at the end of the night, hope that I will have done some version of what our book encourages me to do. And in addition to sharing with you, you know, what I was like and what happened and what I'm like now, our book says that each of us in our own language and from our own point of view talks about how we established a relationship with God. And I hope that that comes through in this talk tonight. But the stories I tell to illustrate my story often change, and some of them you will have heard, and perhaps some of the things tonight you will not, but we'll just take off and see where it goes. And it kind of starts with me having a sobriety date. The last time I had a drink or a drug was June 29th of 1989. and uh so for me i adopted june 30th of 89 as my sobriety date i i asked my sponsor about six months into my sobrietty uh i told him i was confused about a sobrieté date i said is it the last day i had a drink or the first day i didn't and he said steve i'm just so impressed with the quality of questions that are keeping you up at night he said he said i don't care He said, just pick one because I'm much more concerned with you not taking your next drink than when you had the last one. You know, my home group here in Nashville is the Recovery on the Road group of Alcoholics Anonymous. We meet on Wednesdays and Saturdays. I'm not at our Saturday meeting tonight so I could be here. But I asked a fellow, there was a guy I had seen around for a while and a few months ago. So I asked him, I said, remind me, you know, what's your sobriety date? And he said, my most recent one. And I said yeah, let's go with your most recent one, right? So my most recent one is June 30th, 1989. Now, I didn't intend to stop drinking on June the 30th of 1989. I wasn't planning to quit on June 29th as I was having what would turn out to be the last time I've had a drink since that night and tonight. But I was scheduled to go into a treatment program on July the 1st of 1989, and that's because I had been convicted of my sixth DUI here in Williamson County, Tennessee, and as a result of that, there was some jail time going to be associated with that, and we cut a plea bargain agreement that would cut some of that jail time off if I would go to what they called residential drug and alcohol rehabilitation. Now, I will tell you, that's the first time I'd ever heard all those words strung together at one time. And I wasn't quite sure what they meant, but it sounded marginally better than jail. And so I magnanimously said, that I will do that. And I had a year of probation to complete that residential treatment. And I was just coming up on that year. And so July the 1st, I was headed in. And I'll back up a little bit and tell you how I got there. I grew up in Smyrna, Tennessee, just outside of Nashville here where I live. And about 30 miles out of Nashville, middle class family. No particular reason for me to be alcoholic. Certainly my circumstances were not difficult circumstances. I got four, three siblings. I've got an older brother and an older sister and a younger sister. And my mom and dad were both in the home and nobody was knocking anybody around. And while they were drinkers, I didn't view alcohol. I didn'T have an opinion or view alcohol as being problematic one way or the other. It just didn't really register with me, but I was going to be a kid that didn't drink. I made a decision not to drink. I played sports. I was a pretty good kid. I'm a kid that went where he said he was going go. I hung out with who I said I was gonna hang out with and I came home when I said it was gonna come home. And I had as our book says that code of morals and philosophy of living, and they were sufficient for me. Right up to the moment, they were no longer sufficient. And that seemed to coincide with me taking a drink. And I was a freshman in college. My dad had died unexpectedly at 47 years old the year before. That's not why I drank, and it's certainly not why i'm alcoholic, but it made it easier for me to start. You know, my mom was dealing with that. And anyway, I just didn't have anybody I really had to answer to. And as an immature 18-year-old in my first year of college, two guys came by one night. We were going back to my high school to a basketball game and somebody passed around a bottle of Boone's Farm Strawberry Hill Wine. And that's the first, it's probably not the first drink I had because I'm sure I'd had a drink of daddy's beer or a sip of his martini. But it's the first time I ever drank and drank with purpose. And, you know, I blacked out that first night. And I'm a blackout drinker. I love what the comedian David Tell said. He's a blackouts drinker as he likes to call it time travel. And that's the way it felt to me, right? I would drink and it didn't require that much for me to blackout. But I mean, man, I would lose time and I would lose cars and I lost a lot of stuff in those blackouts. It's sort of like coming to and going whoa, how did I get here in the future and what has been going on? If there are any other blackout drinkers on here, you may have done like I did a little bit the next day. I didn't tell people I blacked out and I didn' t ask people questions. I was sort of like a forensic detective trying to figure out what happened the night before without asking direct questions you know you just want to try to read people's faces and go a general how did it go last night you know then we all have that one friend that we call and ask and said man what what happened and it's all steve man even you don't want to know brother it was bad last night and uh and and so i don't know if i was alcoholic before i took that drink that night And I don't know if I was alcoholic right after I took that drink. And I do not know at what point I became alcoholic and I do not argue the point with anyone, but it is hard to know if I were drinking alcoholically because I was drinking so enthusiastically. And it is impossible to know if you could moderate your drinking if you do not try to moderate. It is impossible for me to know whether I could have stopped drinking because I did not try to stop. Why on earth would I stop? I had gotten a relief and a release from this alcohol that was magical to me, and so in no way, you know, our book says that in Bill's writing, it says that while we have no way of proving it, we believe that many of us could have stopped drinking early in our drinking careers, and the reason they have no way of proving it is because like me, they didn't try it. So by the time the consequences were sufficient and made it necessary for me to try to stop, I certainly tried to moderate over time. I tried to do what we read here before the meeting that I had that great obsession that one day I could control and enjoy my drinking. Now, I didn't have that language when I got to Alcoholics synonymous, you gave me language with which to describe and articulate this alcoholism I had that I didn't know how to describe. And when I saw that, and this obsession to control and enjoy my drinking, I don't want to confuse anyone on that. I was never trying to drink just enough to not get drunk. I absolutely wanted to get drunk, I needed to feel differently than before I drank, but I didn't want to get too drunk. You know, I told you I got six DUIs. I didn'T get any of them on purpose. I never once started my night by saying, you know, if I do everything just right, I'm having my first drink, maybe my second drink and thinking, man, if this really goes well tonight by around midnight, one o'clock, I will have been unfaithful in my marriage. I willhave wrecked my car. I will have wet my pants. I'll be handcuffed in the backseat of a police car. Let's quick, let's get this party started. I never planned those things out, but some version of that happened any number of times. So to control and enjoy my drinking was my attempt to drink just enough to get everything alcohol did for me without suffering any of the pains of what it began to do to me. you know I was so I'm trying to how can I drink and not get in trouble how can I drink and not hurt the people around me how can I get what I need from this alcohol without doing damage to myself and others with it and that was a years long obsession as our book describes it to try to pull that off I never tried to stop drinking entirely until 1980 and uh jerry's heard me talk about in in 1980 i was living in atlanta i was actually living out uh north of atlana uh at the old riverbend apartments now they're not much now but in 1980 that was a place to be out there and uh uh i left uh a bar one night and uh I got on I-285 going east in the westbound lane and had a head-on collision. I ran into a car, two cars hit us. It totaled all four cars. It sent some people to the hospital and it sent me to jail, to the Cobb County Jail. And I came to in that Cobb Country Jail I had urinated on myself and I had vomited on myself while in there or at least I say I hope I did because somebody did. And when you're in the drunk tank, you don't always know whether the stains you wake up with were of your own making. I prefer to think that's an indignity I inflicted on myself, but we never know. And I did decide to stop drinking that night or that next morning rather. when I came to in that drunk tank, I had never been more afraid of the consequences that awaited me legally and personally and professionally. I had ever been more embarrassed to be sitting there in my own urine and my own vomit in that drink tank. I have never been ashamed of the harm I had caused to other people, and I did not yet know the extent of the injuries. And they turned out not to be very serious, but I did not know that at this point. And so I had never been more sure that I'm done. I'm going to stop drinking forever. And it was just 10 days later when I'm driving down the road smoking a joint, drinking a bottle of wine, thinking I nearly overreacted to that, man. I nearly stopped drinking altogether. And it didn't feel like powerlessness and it didn'T feel like I was revolting. And it just felt like I changed my mind. It felt likeI was going, man, I'll do better. I'm not going to let that happen again. So I spent a lot of time trying to not let thathappen again, whatever that might be, rather than trying to stop drinking. And I think that's a version of learning to control and enjoy my drink. You know, I drank like my drinking took on more serious proportions, like in Bill's story. And it became a necessity. And I had a lot of alcohol related problems. That's how I showed up at AA with the belief that I had alcohol related problem. Right. I had legal problems that were alcohol related. I had marriage problems that Were alcohol related I had work problems that were alcohol related. Now, here's what I had no idea of. And so I had this relationship with alcohol that alcoholics have, right? I didn't know until I get to AA about this physical allergy, about this mental obsession. None of that was on my radar until I got to Alcoholics Anonymous. So this was great news. this was a revelation to me when I began to hear this idea. As our book says, the doctor's theory that we have an allergy interests us. It explains that for which we could not otherwise account and boy that was huge to me but here's what was a bigger mystery to me. The bigger mystery to me was how I felt sober and I had no idea and it didn't I didn't understand that you could that I was alcoholic even when I wasn't drinking. You know, there's a great line back in a vision from you about Dr. Bob and it says he was painfully aware of being somehow abnormal for he did not yet fully understand what it meant to be alcohol. And I can tell you that I spent a lot of time painfully away or being somehow abnormally and not having any idea of what that was. And if you had said, well, Steve, how do you feel? And I said, well, I feel different. And what do you mean different? How do you feel? And I go, I don't know how I feel, but I know I feel different than I think you feel. And I couldn't have described either of those feelings, but somehow I just don't fit. And I found that to be a pretty common malady amongst alcoholics. And it's a fallacy. It's we think we don't fit. We think we're different, but we're really not. I mean, we're different bodily and mentally as it pertains to alcohol. But I think those internal feelings are the unmanageability of the first step. And that unmanangeability, as our book describes it, you know, on page 52 is a partial description in the bedevilments of inability to control my emotional nature, prey to misery and depression, bouts of fear, feelings of uselessness, can't be of real help to other people. All of those types of feelings, I can't just decide to feel better about. And so I didn't understand that that was part and parcel of my alcoholism. I didn'T understand that those things were, uh, uh that those feelings that I poured alcohol on those. And it changed the way I felt about those things. You know, one of the things I wanted to talk a little bit about, I drank like that. And I mean, up till I was 35 years old. And I married my wife, Connie. Some people on here have met Connie. She and I, Connie and I met in a bar over, I often say she had come to Nashville from where she had been living in Lake Tahoe. She had been married in Lake tahoe. She was dealing Baccarat. She moved back. She got divorced. She showed up in Nashville with a divorce pickup truck and a divorce pocket full of money and a divorced eight ball of cocaine. And I fell immediately for that package. And We started running and gunning together, and a few months later, we went on a trip to Mexico. When we got to Mexico, we drank some tequila out of a coconut or something. We ended up on a boat. We took us out to what they swear were international waters, and an Austrian merchant marine read in Spanish what he swears was a wedding ceremony. Now, that was New Year's Eve of 1982, and we have been uh or 1980 yeah 1982 and we've been married ever since then but not without some problems so on that July the 1st 1989 when I'm getting ready to head off to treatment Connie walked out to uh with me when my friend Ricky was getting ready to drive me off and she gave me the kind of support I know a lot of my brothers and sisters NAA didn't get from their spouses or partners or loved ones or family, and she said no matter what baby don't stop drinking. And she said you go put it you go do what you need to do put in your time and come on back and the party's on. Now Connie wasn't trying to get me to stop drinking that she would have preferred that I drank with her that I drink at home that I didn't do some of the things I was doing when I was drinking, but stopping drinking wasn't the answer. It was just a shift in how we did that drinking together perhaps and I'll tell you lest I forget later on that Connie's sobriety day is 10 days after mine and she is in the other room tonight and And she's a 33-year active member of Alcoholics Anonymous. And we are both very grateful for that. But I'll tell you, even sober, as some of you may have experienced, when we get in recovery, whatever, whether that is AA or Al-Anon or whatever 12-step program we're in, when we Get In Recovery, we change, right? I mean, that's the whole essence of recovery is this psychic change, this spiritual awakening. And that can shake up a relationship on both sides of it. And certainly we had to navigate, to be honest with you, a few years before we figured out how to dance with the new people in the room and to find our rhythm with each other again and to see if we were compatible. Because just like in AA, when we get to Alcoholics Anonymous and it talks about the fact that one of the things that we have here is that we are brought together by this common problem. But we stay together on a common solution upon which we can absolutely agree and join in harmonious and brotherly action. And I would say in a relationship that Connie and I came together at the level of the problem, at the label of our alcoholism and then we got sober. But we had to find where we're together today because we found compatibility. We found a design for living that we were both committed to that has worked for us and worked for this relationship. And we're really grateful for that. You know, I got to that. My buddy Ricky drove me over to that treatment program and it was a place just about five miles from our home. And they took us out to meetings of Alcoholics Anonymous. And I got to tell you that I resisted being an alcoholic for about three weeks. And when I say resisted, I just was not going to say out loud that I was an alcoholic because even though I was frankly fascinated by the meetings we were going to and I was captivated by what I was hearing. and as you guys again gave voice to things that I had not been able to articulate and I would listen to you talk and you would say something and I wouldn't know the moment before you said it. I didn't know that that was true about me and the moment after you said I knew it had been true forever and so you were speaking that language of the heart And I really didn't understand that. And what I mean by that, when I say language of the heart, it just means that the message you were providing me wasn't resonating intellectually. It was resonating internally, spiritually. It was, I would come home and I would say to Connie, well, you should have heard the speaker tonight, unbelievable. And she would say, well what did he say or what did she say? And I would go, I don't know. Right. Because I wouldn't remember the information, but I had an experience. Maybe the nicest compliment anyone has ever paid me was a gentleman who stopped by the breakfast table after a conference that I had spoken at the night before. And he walked by my table and I didn't I had not met him. I still know him today and he's a friend. But he said, Steve, I sure didn't enjoy that talk last night. He said, I don't remember the words to the song, but I sure enjoyed the music. And I think that that's what happens for us sometimes, at least for me, often in AA, that it's the music, it is the experience I have rather than it being an intellectual exercise. It becomes a spiritual exercise and it resonates in here. But certainly that wasn't, I didn't know any of that three weeks over. I'm hearing what you guys are saying. I'm kind of loving it, but there's one thing that I was pretty sure of. If I said out loud I was an alcoholic, one of you were going to suggest I not drink anything at all, and that was going to be an overcorrection to my problem because I still did not understand this inability to control my drinking. So anyway, it was just – but I got captivated by alcoholics and I missed very quickly, and I made a decision to stop drinking. And I said, you know, I know I need to not drink. Don't know if I'm an alcoholic, but I know I need did not drink, so I'm going to not dream. And since I'm here at this AA, AA is how I'm going to try to not drinking and hang out with these AA people and not drink and to be honest with you, I thought that's what a life of recovery was going to be, that we will hang out together and not dream And it's not going to be much fun. It's going to be a small life. It's going to be all about where I can't go and what I can't do and who I can't hang out with. It's going to be a life full of self-sacrifice. My life is about to get really small. We'll just get together and not drink. I thought not drinking was an actual activity in Alcoholics Anonymous. Would you look at him, not drink over there? We would turn it in. If If I felt like a drink, you guys would try to talk me out of it. If you felt like the drink, I'd try to talk you out of that's what the rest of my life was going to be. And I can tell you 33 years later, that absolutely is not the case. So so as any of you who have been around for a good while, I'm sure share my experience that that that I'm not here tonight out of desperation. I absolutely understand that I can take a drink. I've got a friend that at 26 years sober and a strong AA member that started, you know, that lost his sobriety date about six months ago. I know it can happen, but I'm not here out of desperation or fear of getting drunk. I'm here because I'm attracted to and drawn by the life I have today. And the fact that this AA life continues, this opportunity for growth, for continued spiritual advancement. And by spiritual advancement, I don't mean getting smarter about spiritual things. I mean getting freer of the bondage itself. I mean going through this time where I can get more and more comfortable with me as limited and flawed as I am. and uh and alcoholics anonymous through the process of our 12 steps begins to remove those things that block me off from the sunlight of the spirit but by the way those are the same things that blocked me off an intimate and real relationship with you and i would tell you that both things when i said at the beginning of this talk that one of the things i wanted to get to was how i established a relationship with god What I recognize today is if I don't have that relationship with a higher power, I frankly don't Have a relationship with you. And if I Don't have a relationship With you, I don' Have a Relationship with a Higher power. Those things seem Inextricably tied together in my experience for me. And the closer, the more freedom from self I get, The closer to you I become. And as our book says, as we disclose ourselves to him or as we draw near to him, he will disclose himself to me. And the way I draw nearer to him is to hang out with you guys. The way I drew nearer him is through the process of the 12 steps. The way i draw near the hand is to help God's kids for fun and for free and to let God's kid help me. It's both sides of that equation. You know, there was a man years ago, a guy named Jack out of Rhode Island and Jack, Jack G. And he was a wonderful guy. He had a tracheotomy and he spoke through one of those kind of vibrating things in his if you've seen that. And and Jack once gave me a he was prone to handing out these little necklaces and pins and things like that. And the one he handed me was a little medallion and it had two clasping hands on it. You guys have seen versions of those two clashing hands a lot of places, but it said on it said everybody needs help. And then on the bottom, it said, everybody can help. And I think the point of that is with those clashing hands, we don't know whether we're the one helping or we're the one receiving because usually both things are happening at once. And that's been a critical aspect of Alcoholics Anonymous for me. But I came out of that treatment facility and I was excited, if you will, about AA. And by AA at that time, I don't mean the steps. I don'T mean the program of recovery. I mean the fellowship. I was exciting to hang out with you guys and to sit in a meeting. But I'll tell you what happened to me. Again, I still didn't realize that those feelings of separateness that I had were part of this selfishness and self-centeredness, that's the root of my problem. This hyper self-consciousness, I had no idea because that had not gone away yet and I hadno idea that that was associated to my alcoholism. I'm about six months sober. I'm loving coming to AA meetings but I'm mostly coming and going home, coming and Going Home. And there was a Saturday meeting uh down at 202 the clubhouse here in nashville and at the end of the meeting it was a lunchtime meeting 11 30 to 12 30. at the into the meeting somebody said a bunch of us are going to lunch who wants to go like it was an open invitation and man i desperately wanted to go and and because i've realized these people are talking to each other between meetings i had no idea you guys were building relationships that you were hanging out that this was happening i'm sure it had been sin before I had just not heard it. But this day they said, who wants to go? And man, I got in my car to head over to the restaurant that they had said they were going to have lunch at and about halfway there, I turned off and went home. And then the next week, same thing. I desperately wanted to go, but I got about halfway there and turned off in one home and did that three weeks in a row. And the reason is, is because I was afraid to be embarrassed. I was afraid to have an awkward moment. I wasn't afraid that I would walk into that restaurant and there would already be six people sitting at a table for six. And I wouldn't know whether to ask you could I pull up a chair with task you to scoot over? By the way, do you even remember me from the media? Did you mean me? So I wasn' going to subject myself to that possibility. And I would just go home. And what I realize, and we say in Alcoholics Anonymous, our literature does that the alcoholic knows loneliness as few do. And I will tell you that loneliness doesn't go away just because I put a drink down. In fact, that loneliness or the awareness of that loneliness is often exacerbated by that. Because now that hyper self-consciousness, that self-centered fear is is out front and i didn't know how much i was uh uh that that was running my life but i'm still hanging out and i'm digging i get a sponsor and i got a guy named frank and frank he was a big book guy and i did know they were you know big book guys and big book studies and different types of meetings i didn's know any of that stuff i just kind of fell in with him and the crowd he was with and it just really served me well you know uh i got up when it was a small little meeting that that was going on at the same time that there was a much bigger discussion meeting going on there at 202 and one day i got out about five minutes into our meeting and i was going to walk out to the big discussion meeting and frank said where are you going kid and he embarrassed me but i said frank i think i'm going to go out here to the discussion meeting he said why don't you sit down? He said, why don'T you hang out in here with us for a little while. He said so when you go to the discussion meeting you will know whether what you're hearing is Alcoholics Anonymous and you'll know whether if what you are sharing is Alcoholics Anonymous. And he was an anti-discussion meeting or topic meeting by any stretch but he wanted me to get acquainted with the program of recovery that's laid out in our literature and get some experience in trying to bring that into my life and that's what that little group of many women did we spent a lot of time talking with each other about how to try to do what was on the page right i mean i'm in there and i see i take that third step prayer right we read that and they go i'm on board i'm turning my will in my life over now what does that mean how do i do it how do I go do this at home how do l do this work let's talk about the practical application of these spiritual principles in my day-to-day living. And that's what some of those folks really got me started, and for me it set a foundation that has fit me well, and I'm grateful for that. But one of my problems when I get to AA is the fact that when I finally raised my hand and pled guilty to being an alcoholic, I read the next line in the book that said, if I'm alcoholic, I may be suffering from an illness which only a spiritual experience can conquer. And I thought, oh, damn, that's a problem, right? I got this alcoholism. I've just pleaded to being powerless over it. I got a problem I can't solve. I'm in a trap I can'T spring. And you're offering me a solution that I'm uninterested in and don't believe. me. I didn't even for the first six months I'm sober, I wouldn't hold hands and say the Lord's prayer as we typically did in our meetings there in Nashville. I would step away from the circle. And by the way, the men and women of AA said that that was perfectly okay. And I'm grateful for that. And if somebody else is doing that, it is perfectly okay, but I did have a guy come ask me why i did that and and and i was as honest as i could be and i said i don't want to be a hypocrite i said I don't know what i believe and i'm not just gonna hold hands and sing kumbaya with the rest of the campers because that's what you guys are doing and he had heard my treatment fifth step which was a uh a confession uh to the extent that i was able to be honest at that time but he had heard about infidelities in my marriage. He had heard about a head-on collision on the interstate, he had heard me stealing time and money from a family business. He'd heard about 60 UIs, he'd heard me being drunk at the hospital when my daughter was born. He heard all these stories and he said but hypocrisy, he said that is where you draw the line right? And he said that's really impressive Steve. He said I got good news for you and bad news for you. And of course I felt condescended to, and the reason is he was being condescending. That's what I figured out since then. But he says, I got good news and bad news. And I said, well, I'll play. What's the bad news? And he said, the bad new is hypocrisy is way down your list of problems. And what's the good news? I asked. And he the good new is there's room for another hypocrite in alcoholics. And, and I would tell you, I'm as grateful tonight as I was then that there's room for a hypocrite in AA, a hypocrate like me. And that let me just move a little further into the room and feel a little bit more part of. I had a little crisis of faith at about eight years sober and was trying to figure out, and that's probably my problem, I was trying to figure out something spiritual that is not an intellectual exercise again. But I couldn't quite get a conception of a higher power that I could relate to. And see, that's really what we're doing. This is my perspective. And when I said earlier that it says each of us talks from his own point of view, that'S a really helpful line to me because all the point of view is is what it looks like from here. And it's quite possible that my point of view is different than someone else's point of view, and that doesn't make either of us wrong. It just means we're looking at it maybe from a different angle. But part of the feeling that I had was I couldn't find, I couldn'T get a conception of this higher power that would work for me. And finally, I was able through we agnostics and a couple of stories that I heard. You know, there's the story that some of you've heard me share of the blind men and the elephant. And it goes, there were three men from Hindustan to learning much inclined. They went to see an elephant, but all of them were blind. So one of them grabbed the elephant by its tail. And one of then grabbed the elephant around its big leg. And one of them grabbed the elephant by its trunk and they went back to their village and the villagers said, tell us about the elephant. Tell us about the elephant and the one who had grabbed the elephant by his tail said it's like rope. And the one who grabbed it around its legs said it is like the trunk of a tree. And the one who grabbed the elephant by its trunk said it's like a snake. And they argued endlessly over what an elephant was, never realizing that the elephant was big enough to incorporate all those traits. And They weren't describing the elephant, they were describing their relationship to the elephant. They were describing Their touch point to the elephant. And in NAA, we'd say that I will share with you how I established a relationship with God. In AA, we say that what we're trying to do is relate ourselves rightly to him. So at our best, we talk about how we establish the relationship. We don't necessarily talk about God, right? I don't tell you who or what God is. I tell you how i got connected and how I establish the relationship. And that has been a critical point of view for me that's helpful to me uh perhaps no one else but that has given me a lot of room to have my own experience without challenging your experience if it looks or sounds different it's given me a Lot of Room and I'm really grateful for that I'm going to share about two quick stories here in the in the four minutes that I've got left and uh and and some of it is just about how things, today what I realize is ever since I put the drink down, what I'm looking for more and more and More is a continued freedom from self to get over myself. You know, I sat in a meeting a few years sober, there was a young woman in there, a young girl, actually, she was 2016, my wife actually sponsored her mother. But this girl was really a mess. And she started to share in this beginners meeting and she got tongue tied and she Got embarrassed and she stumbled all over herself. And as she's talking, she said, I've just got to get over myself. And I'm sitting in my chair and I thought me too, baby, me too. I got to Get Over Myself. That's what the rest of my sobriety has been post-drinking. It's this selfishness, this self-centeredness is the root of my problem. The troubles of the alcoholic arise from within. None of my problems are external. They're all internal, but they look external. I spent Monday out, excuse me, Tuesday afternoon on a monthly gathering I get on Zoom with some of my friends from around the country. And two of the friends on there are facing end-of-life situations. Their time on the calendar has been marked by the medical community. Now, that may or may not happen. But as we sat there and talked about time, and tom ivester that many of you on here will have heard or perhaps remember tom ivester used to say that there's no time in the spiritual world so the experience that i can have whether it is until is in the moment and both of those gentlemen talked about how their eyes were more open how their experiences were deeper how they didn't want to waste any time with petty fear and anger and frustration. You know, that fear is the thief of joy. And my dear friend and sponsor said, he said, you know what? He said, there's nothing that I was afraid of last year that is even on in my vision today. And what I would say to you and to me, more importantly to me Is that we have that opportunity We have that opporunity any given day And we speak a lot in Alcoholics Anonymous about a day at a time And we initially tend to frame that around not drinking one day at the time That not drinking that I talked about earlier If you're new, we say can you not drink today and get back and get to tomorrow's meeting? And can you get through this hardship today? Can you endure it? But at a certain point, that day at a time shifts and it gets past me being able to endure this day to how can I embrace this day? How can I live happily and comfortably and at peace in this very day under this very set of circumstances? And that is available to me. I'm just not often surrendered enough to accept the gift. Always end with a short little poem, because a guy here in Nashville used to recite this poem, a guy named Mo H before he at the end of every talk he gave, and it described my relationship with that higher power that I have mentioned a couple of times in this talk. And when Mo came down with cancer in 2003, my friend Jerry and I went to breakfast with him at what would turn out to be six weeks before he passed away. And we knew it was probably our last time together. And I asked Moe at that breakfast, I said, Moe, would you mind if when I get a chance to share my story, that I end with that poem? Because it describes so succinctly my experience in alcoholic synonyms. And Moe was a humble man and he just kind of smiled and he said, oh, Steve, he said, if you think it'll help another drunk. Well, I say not immodestly that I've been able to share this poem with tens of thousands of people since October of 2003. I have never ended a talk like this without sharing that poem. And it has always helped another drunk because I'm the drunk. It always helps. And he said I sought my God, my God I could not see. and I sought my soul. My soul eluded me and I saw my fellow man and found all three and see again, that's what finding this higher power is for me. I can't get my arms around it. I canít describe or comprehend that power but I do know when you guys are kind enough to invite me to spend some time with you, when you take this hour and pretend politely to listen to me, that what happens is that power shows up in a way that I can't define or comprehend, but it's made it unnecessary for me to take a drink since June the 30th of 1989. And most of that time when I'm willing to accept the gift, it offers me a life that is happily and usefully whole. And for that, I'm eternally grateful. Thank you so much for having me tonight. Thank you, sir.