The Surrender That Happens in the Now – Howard P.

Hi everybody. My name is Howard and I'm an alcoholic. I'm very honored to be here and I want to thank Popeye for asking me. And I want to thank Stu for his talk last night. It was a great talk. I am not going to give that good to talk, but I'll give a longer one to make up for it. I also want to thank Stu for about 30 years ago going to the treatment center and rescuing Keith L. He and his bunch of sponsees now and he's really, if I can keep that cell phone away from him. Anyway, Anyway, this has really been a great experience for me coming out here and meeting so many wonderful people. I've been out here before, but not in this city. And this has been a Great Trip for me and for Pat. There's a couple administrative things I want to clear up. One is that from time to time, I look at my watch. Now, I have been told how long I have to do this. They allow me to talk. And I look up my watch from time to time not to see what time it is but to give those of you that are worried about it a sense of optimism. I also, for some of the new people I make up stuff and say that it's in the big book I quote it and I say what page it's on and nobody ever checks and so you're not supposed to check but it adds credibility to my talk when I do that So we go through page numbers and stuff. And my talk can't get longer, but I'm getting older. So I have to compress things a little more than... And so I was born 1,000 years ago, approximately, in Los Angeles, California. And I don't remember when I was a kid living in California. We moved out of there back to Kansas. I was the sixth kid born in eight years, one in California, one back and forth. My folks were Okies many times over. And we ended up in this farm community about 45 miles southwest of Wichita, Kansas. And in the farm communities, back in the 30s, the little towns existed in order to feed the farmers and provide their stores for them. And that was why the town existed. And we had free movies in our little town to track some of the neighboring towns' farmers into our markets. And one of the free movies I saw, there was generally a short feature, a comedy, and a long feature. And the short feature this time was training wild elephants in India. It was a travelogue movie, and they took the baby elephants out of the herd, And they started their training by putting a rope around their right front leg and tying them up to a strong tree. And the baby elephant had always been able to go with the herd. They were still young, but, you know, and he fought that rope and fought that robe and fought dat rope until his experience caused him to come to believe that when the rope's tight, it's futile to pull. And when the trainers saw they had learned that, they went to the next phase of the training. But each phase of The Training reinforced that truth that when The Rope's Tight, It's Futile to Pull. So at the end of the movie, this elephant was strong enough they'd hook a tree, they'd cut the tree down, trim the limbs off, put the trunk on a harness, and this elephant would pull the tree out of the forest for harvest. At the lunch break, in order to hold the elephant, they put a rope around his right front leg, and they drove a stake just deep enough so that when they tied the rope around the stake and the elephant walked around, where as soon as the rope got tight, the elephant couldn't pull. He couldn't pull against the tide. The stake didn't hold the elephant. The rope didn't help the elephant What held the elephant was the limiting belief the trainer had imposed on him when he was a baby. I came to Alcoholics Anonymous approximately approximately 250,902, a rough approximation, of baby elephant beliefs just like that. Stuff that had been imposed on me when I was a kid, when I as a baby and then a kid and then all the way through, many of them reinforced and many of those don't work. I was taught as a baby elephant that I was separate from God nobody said you're separate from god but they said god's up in heaven behind the pearly gates on the streets of gold well they'd have told me he was in Wichita I would have known we were separate and wherever this other place is I know I'm not there and I was told I would never be there probably and I was told that if I wanted God's help I had to do what God wanted me to do now God didn't tell me what he wanted to do but there was plenty of the people in this little farm town that told me what God wanted me TO DO And it wasn't anything I wanted to do. But if I don't do it, I'm not only going to hell forever, I'm going to hell forever and ever. I remember the first time when I remember who I was praying to what I was praying for. And what we were praying for was a Sunday morning in church, we all fervently prayed for it not to rain until after the wheat was harvested. Lots of reasons why we don't want it to rain when the wheat's ripe. all of which we explained to God and I'm telling you that afternoon it not only rained, it hailed the wind blew and destroyed all the wheat in Sumner County, Kansas and while nobody pointed their finger at me I knew whose fault it was that it had rained I wasn't doing what God wanted me to do and the rest of you were. And if you're five or six years old and you've assumed the entire responsibility for wiping out the Kansas wheat crop, what you have is an ego problem. The old ego basing its sense of well-being on it having its way and trying to control things that it has absolutely no power to control. And then when that don't work, we're doubling into it, you know. And my dad was an alcoholic and my dad, I didn't know this for a long time but dad was not happy with who he was or what he was turning out to be and I found out later from my mom that dad blamed his parents on spoiling him and that was why he turned out so bad. Well, Dad did not make that mistake with me. He whipped me and he did the best he could, but about four or five times he beat me harder than you should beat a child. and dad had a 7th grade education if anybody would have told him don't whip a kid like that you'll traumatize him dad's idea was if he gets that trauma I'll whip it out of him now I was not one of those people that got where they liked to be whipped in Los Angeles they have some and they hang them up there and then they whip them and they like it apparently I am not one of those My wife is sitting on the front row there, and she and I will celebrate this month our 65th wedding anniversary. We were five when we got married. And we were married up until a couple years ago. I never thought to ask her if she would like for me to whip her. I still haven't asked her. I wouldn't like it, and she wouldn't either. So as a baby elephant, I never learned to feel good and I never learned to accept things. and when I was about 12 or 13 years old, I drank my first half of a half a pint of whiskey and I remember so clearly when it started to feel good, that dawning on me, this is what feeling good is. This is the feeling of feeling good. This is what they mean when they say, let's go have a few drinks and get the feeling good. God, I tell you, and then you throw up. But you just kind of, you don't worry about that. You just get that good feeling. And man, that's how I felt good. It works. I felt good, and I was somebody. Pat will tell you, I was a jerk. But I was somebody. And that is so much better than not being anybody. I had been taught that I was no good and that I never would be good. I have potential, which I'm not doing anything to develop. Well, that wasn't right. I was potentially an alcoholic and I was doing everything you could to develop that. I fell in love with Pat in the seventh grade and we got married when we were 20 and I Was still in the service during the Korean War but we had about a month or so to do and 11 months later our oldest son was born and I put on the best act I could about having confidence and going to set the world on fire and all that but inside I was already you know, I was immobilized with fear anxious about everything I was in over my head in life, and I got a job as a toolmaker for about six years. And for six years, I never made one tool that didn't have to be reworked before anybody would accept it. But I learned a ton of stuff about engineering design and engineering drawings and the math and stuff, and I was going to school to get an engineering degree. And on Friday, I got laid off from a toolmaker, and it was a bad weekend. And then I went to work at General Dynamics Astronautics as an entry-level engineer, way in over my head. It turns out I really wasn't except for report writing. I could not write reports until I took it home to write it and inadvertently had a few drinks and then wrote the reports with a technical vocabulary I didn't even know I had. I mean, it was just magic. And it stayed magic. I went from a process analyst, that was my entry-level engineer's job, to an engineer, to a senior engineer, to kind of a senior senior engineer and then an engineering manager. That's not setting the world on fire, But that is a progressing series of promotions that I got because I drank whiskey. And I know I wouldn't have got it if I hadn't have drank whiskey, It's just that pretty soon the whiskey stops solving problems and causes more than, And it was way too soon, And I remember my boss came in early one morning and called me in and said, you know, I can smell that you're drinking already. I said, Tom, well, I was, but I wasn't going to tell him. I said、Tom, that isn't this morning. That's from yesterday. And he said、Well, your speech is slurred. I said、「That's from yesterday." He said, you've got to get this straightened out or I've got to let you go. And I've always, I've studied a lot and I've read stuff. And I had read a book by Carl Jung. It wasn't a book. It was just a little article. and it was about a phenomenon where things happen apparently by accident but turn out to be the best things that could happen for what's going on at the time. Synchronicity was the title of the... And I was in my drinking place called the Tattletail Lounge at the corner of Sepulveda and Sawtelle we were deep, deep thinkers in Tattletale and I I anyway a guy came in selling little white pills with crosses on them he stacked them on top of each other. I always see enough heads nod that I can be comfortable with it. He stacked these together and wrapped them in tinfoil and sold them. I said, man those look like lifesavers. Those are lifesaver. Benzedrine and booze. Bins are drained steep, and if you take a couple binnies, the slurring of the speech goes away altogether. You say the same thing over and over, and you say it really fast. And I got demoted. Just in time to ruin my life, I had run up bills that Pat didn't know about. She paid all the bills that she knew about. But I couldn't tell her about these because there was no money coming in to pay these bills. And it started to get close to $3,000 and I had an opportunity to sell some equipment that was owned by the federal government but in the custody of Hughes Helicopters where I worked at the time. And I managed with the fence and the tattletale to get it out of the gate and to the fence. and he disappeared and so did the equipment now I'm in real trouble not only that I told I told the owner of the tattletale if anybody comes in looking for test equipment tell them that you know somebody that can get it for them the next morning I woke up it was the 23rd of July 1972 and I realized whiskey was no longer making me smart I was no longer intelligent at all this is dumb to tell somebody else in the bar when you know that the dumbest FBI guy in town when he sees they're missing test equipment at use, would just go to the bars and say, do you know any place where I could buy test equipment? Yeah, Howard is selling, you know. And I knew I had to stop drinking until this blew over. I just kept digging my hole deeper. You'd think I was in over my head, which I was. but I can still dig deeper throw it out and so I called this guy who I used to drink with in the Tattletail in the tattletale we believed he was the president of Alcoholics Anonymous worldwide who he actually was was the secretary of the Culver City studio group but I couldn't have gone to the vice president I had to see the president and I called Kenny asking if he was in AA he said yes I said I want some time for you to take me to a meeting he said how about tonight oh no, no not tonight I got stuff to do tonight But he talked me into it. And it was a beginner's meeting. And you go in and you have no idea if you're brand new. At the beginner's meet, they said, anybody here in their first meeting? My hand was the only one that went up. And another thing you don't know is they're going to change the topic, whatever it was, to what is an alcoholic and how do you stop drinking? Chuck, who was our, Chuck was our long-timer. I think he had 22 years in. Chuck, what is a alcoholic? it. And Chuck gets up and I thought, man, how articulate, what a clear, I had been in the tattletale, we did not talk that articulate, you know? He said, he said, I was an editor, a film editor at MGM. And at the end of the day, I would cross the street to Washington Boulevard to the backstage bar just to have one drink, two, three at the absolute top. And then the next thing he knows it's 2 o'clock in the morning, last call for alcohol, and he's drunk and he's mad because they won't give him another drink. Your clock set back. And I'm identifying with all this, you know. And then he said, I went to Alcoholics Anonymous. I came to Alcoholic Anonymous and I learned that my problem is I am an alcoholic. He said, alcoholics are men and women who have lost the ability to control their drinking. that the loss of control is characterized by an insane, obsessive belief which the alcoholic has that gives him the motivation to take the first drink because he knows this time it's going to be different. This time he's goingto control and enjoy his drinking. This time he's just going to get a feeling good. But coupled with that insane obsession is a physical reaction to alcohol, peculiar to alcoholics as a class of people, that manifests itself in the phenomenon of a craving for more. A craving, Chuck said, which was stronger than the alcoholic's willpower to not drink. Man, I thought that for a little bit I might be an alcoholic, but on January the 1st, 1965, I had put out a cigarette, a stroke of midnight. And I said, that's my last cigarette. Fifteen seconds later, I am craving a cigarette. And fifteen minutes later, I am craving it more. But because I have a strong willpower, I have not smoked a cigarette since the first of January 1965. So in 1972, I know that if it's a craving, I have the willpower to override the craving. And I can stop drinking if that's the deal. The next Monday, I went to San Diego. A guy had offered a second job for me, which was really a god shot. And it was going to pay me just what we owed that Pat didn't know about. All that stuff's stressful. And I wanted to show myself that I could have a drink and not drink anymore. So I ordered the double shot of Old Crow with a glass of water back. Joe and Charlie, I'm sure many of you know Joe and Shirley. you and Charlie used to talk about willy power and he don't know what happens to willy power once the alcoholic takes a drink but you won't find willy power in your life except to have another drink that'll be all the willpower the alcoholic has once he starts to drink I spent four days and four nights on the streets of San Diego. I couldn't make it to the airport, but I couldn'T make it past the bar in the airport to go get on the plane. And I'd stop by the bar and then I was off and running for that day. Friday morning, I'm thinking deep and it occurs to me, I'm going into this liquor store and buy a bottle and keep it on me so that I can make it to the gate. And on the street of San Diego it dawned on me I saw that every problem I have and I've lost everything now Pat will not let me back in the house I'm a candidate for hard time in the federal penitentiary. They've got to fire me at work. I've been gone four days and I haven't called in. Three days is the company policy. I've lost everything. And because I'm drinking whiskey, I have to stop and I can't stop. I'm going to AA and see if they can help me stop. Those are the three common denominators to surrender. You are utterly defeated, you know you're utterly defeated and you ask for help. And no big deal, but since I surrendered on the streets of San Diego, not once have I ever believed that if I have a drink, it's going to make things better. Anytime I have thought about drinking, I have known I'm going right back to page 8 in the big book. No words can express the loneliness and despair I found in that bitter morass of self-pity. Quicksand stretches out in every direction, in every area of our lives we're sinking and there's absolutely nothing in my life to stop it I am beaten and since that happened, of course I haven't had a drink since August the 4th, 1972. And I asked Kenny to be my sponsor and I told Kenny that I don't believe God is in my life. I believe that God created the universe. I believe in God. There's too much order and harmony for there not to be God, but I believe that God created the, the, the universe imbued it with immutable laws which are unfolding in order and harmony in every aspect of all being. And if you want to learn to fly an airplane or a helicopter learn the laws of aerodynamics learn how you apply those laws with an airfoil and engage the airfoils in the atmosphere and it generates lift just and that will happen whether you believe in God or not because it is God's law and I very quickly believed that the way you stay sober is in Alcoholics Anonymous that's from my point of view back then with my dad having gotten sober in 1946 and died sober at an AA meeting in 51 I knew that if he got sober now I was in the service by the time he died but But I thought this is the answer. Just come and, but I ain't going to work the steps and I don't think God's in my life. Can I still have an AA program? And Kenny said, yes, absolutely. Your program will be, let's go to a meeting every night for 30 days in a row. I'll take you. is that it? He said, that's it. That'll be your whole program. Well, his is to add stuff to that on the way to the meeting. Stuff like don't drink, you know. He said I can't ask you not to drink because I drank. But I'll tell you it don't work until you stop drinking. I almost know I wouldn't have taken a drink I swear if you'd have put a gun to my head, I knew not to drink. But I didn't know how not to be immobilized with fear and anxiety and angry as a scalded rattlesnake. And Pat had no deep appreciation for the fact that I've gone several weeks without a drink. My boss acted like I should stay sober and come to work every day and stay sober every day. Where's the appreciation for this sacrifice that I am making? Well, I found it by going to AA and finding some humor and finding really profound stuff. One guy from Beverly Hills said if you make one mistake and brood about making that mistake. You've made two mistakes. And I thought, now that is profound. I'm going to take that home with me and add it to my program. I'm not going to brood. I got home, I brooded about brooding. Steve from San Diego said, I was 36 years in learning that all the people that I hate don't feel the hate and it's killing me. Profound. I'm going to stop hating people. I hated Ski for saying that. Now, it isn't that I didn't hear some good things that worked in the moment. One of them was if you don't want to slip, don't go where it's slippery. and I never went back in I used to when I quit forever go into the Tattletail and order a Virgin Mary say hey there's nothing in this but tomato juice fix me another one and put some vodka in that one and then I'd off and running Stayed away from it altogether. That, I think, is why the first surrender can be worked 100%. And you never drink again. Once you surrender that you're not going to drink, you're going to stop drinking, then you aren't necessarily connected with alcohol and drugs again. You're totally separate from it. And if you keep working the steps and keep knowing that you can't drink, that will work. And this guy T-Bout, who was Bill W.'s psychologist just back in the early 50s when Bill was working on the 12 and 12. And he was deeply depressed. And Tebowt come in, medical doctor, and he was very helpful to Bill, but he was helpful to the fellowship too. He wrote a series of essays on surrender. And he said that 12 steps of recovery, now think about this, The 12 steps of recovery are designed to bring about the deepest surrender possible in every step. It isn't just the first part of the first step, but it's the surrender and each increment of each step, which we not only have to have, Thiebaud said. I'm going along with him. If you surrender, you will change. And if there's no change, there has been no surrender. They are inseparable. If you surrender, you change. Otherwise, you're unsurrendered and you're at best submissive. I submit that I will do this for as long until I can convince myself that now I can drink like I wanted to. And then it's down the tubes again. And we can come up with all kinds of rationale and reasons to have that drink unless you have surrendered and I had surrendered so I wouldn't drink and I surrendered that I'm going to meetings and I went and I heard these things but one day on a Saturday I went to the Malibu meeting and there was a top lawyer he actually ended up to be an appellant court judge named Don G. And Don said, if you're new in the program or if you are just coming back and renewing your commitment and you are not working the steps, AA will not be fun. And you will after a while decide But AA isn't going to work for me. I mean, I like the meetings fine, but I go home and Pat's still kicked off at me. My boss is still adding pressure, stressful stuff to my life, like working without anything to drink, thinking without anything. Anything to drink. It's stressful. and so AA I'm not going to drink but I ain't going to go to those meetings anymore he said if you don't go to the meetings you'll go back to the bar and you'll order a drink and if you do that and the bartender says what's the matter I thought you was going to AA don't AA work if you're not working the steps be honest with him and tell him you don' t know if it would work or not because you wouldn't try. That rang my gong. I told the guy that had ridden out there with me, I'm going to work the steps. He said, I'm not. No big, you know. He was a wealthy contractor. We buried him in three years and he, you now, he had a lot of reasons for not working the steps and manic depression. He had a lot of reasons, but the fact is I don't care what you've got. If you've Got Alcoholism and you want to recover from that, you work the steps. There's a bunch of other stuff, but you work the steps, or I don' t think very many of us would be here. Anyway, so I didn' t realize it, but what I had done when I said I'm going to work the steps was surrender. And the next night was Sunday and there was an actor at this Sunday night meeting who turned out to be a good friend of mine. And he was bald headed and a character actor but he wore long hair which he had gotten cut off and he looked like a haircut from the 30s and 40s. And I said, hey, Archie, you got a part, didn't you? He said, Howard, it isn't a part. I got a dialogue in four different scenes of a movie called The Sting that is starring Paul Newman and Robert Redford. And we just signed a contract with the producers so that they're going to pay residuals on movies shown forever. He said, I'll never have to work again just from that movie. He said you're going to the Palisades tomorrow? I said yes and I should warn you I'm the speaker and I'd heard him talk before and I wasn't that excited but they have to go now. He's told you he's going to take Roll. They weren't a hell of a year when I talked. I know they don't do that, but you think they do. And Archie started out by saying, my name is Archie and I'm an alcoholic. And for the last several weeks, I've wanted what I've been getting in life so much that I'm not trying to get what I want. and that's what we try to do in AA he said God is in the now and in the now whatever is happening love that because that's whats going to happen anyway and the problem is it's not what you want that's the only problem you have is if you're upset it's because you're not getting what you want And so you've got to surrender that you lack the power to wrest happiness and satisfaction out of this world by your managing things well. You certainly can manage your life the best you can, but do not base your sense of well-being on the outcome. I'm sitting there and I'm thinking yeah Archie you got a big part in the movie if I'd have got the big movie part I'd love my life too I wonder how you'd do if somebody's jabbing you sticking me every time you walk into the house or at work I'd like to see you love that I went outside and it's raining as hard as it can rain in the Pacific Palisades in California. And I've hated the rain since I wiped out the wheat crop. And I got in the car soaked to the skin and the voice that has talked to me all my life said, why don't you love the rain, Howard? It's going to rain anyway. Okay, I was able to go home, take a shower, put on dry clothes, get in bed and love the rain. We have wooden shingles on that house and it was soothing and I loved the rain and then I dropped off to sleep and when I woke up, it wasn't raining And they said, damn. And then I thought, yeah, you got to adjust to the now. Now it's not raining. Love it. You loved it before the rain. Now, how did that happen? As I went along, I was working the steps. But as I went alone, I'll tell you something else. I was not brooding the way I usually brood. I was never angry or hateful as I usually am. And that is because I surrendered that I'm not going to work the steps. And while I hadn't even really gotten started on it, the change was there. A long time in my seeing that, And I used to hear people talk about the moment of clarity. Well, I didn't have a clear moment. I didn' t think, you know. But I was having them right along, just going to me. And I did work the steps. My sponsor moved out of town. And I actually, I mean, I was an engineer and I could read and I didn''t want a new sponsor. and I worked my way through the steps the first time through the steps and it was transforming in my life I did what the big book says other than pray I didn't pray but the big book on page 66 and 67 laughter I didn's know two page numbers but I use them and there is on those pages what in Texas they call the sick man's prayer and you look at the sick man and know that he like you are sick and that he had to have his way and you had to have yours and he was in a position of strength somehow so that he could keep you from having in your way. So, of course you hate him. You resent him. You just don't like him. Every time you think of him, you rescind it. And you look at that from an entirely different angle. And, you see, that's my dad. He was an alcoholic just like me. What he was taught, his baby elephant belief, was You've got to beat it out of him. And he isn't responding, you've got to beat him more. And I saw that. And I cut him slack. I didn't ask God to help me give him patience. I gave him patience I gave him tolerance I gave him kindness and I gave him compassion. I didn' t even know to do that I didn''t know how to do it. But I had surrendered that I wanted to do it. And then when you surrender, the answer comes. That is to change. And without the surrender, there's no change. And that whole process took all the tall poles in my tent out of my life. That brought me to AA. and everything was going good and my wife went to Al-Anon and she turned on me. We grew up where the father was the boss of the household and she was raised in that same community and she saw that like I did. until a few Al-Anon meetings, and she stopped caving in to me. And I went to my sponsor. I had a new sponsor now, and I said, George, she's no longer reasonable. I mean, I give her reasons, and he says, Howard, you always have better reasons than I am, but I'm just not going to do this. that's unreasonable he said it's time to go through the steps again I said I don't think she's ever gone through the steps I know it I know he had me in mind and this was a wonderful thing there's no question in anybody's mind that got sober in 1972, that we have a much, much better big book 12-step program because of Joe and Charlie. But I did my fourth step before Joe and Charley's, at least before they really got started with their Big Book Comes to Life seminar. And Jack B., who was an emcee for a very successful radio and television show called Queen for a Day. And he was my sponsor's sponsor's sponsored. And he would be a brilliant guy, and he had read the big book, and his approach was just like Joe and Charlie's in three columns, your inventory, your resentment. And you go through each resentment and surrender the resentment in favor of forgiveness. Patience, kindness, tolerance, and compassion are forgiving. There's no quid pro quo, no let's make a deal. You give it. And so I did that. This is a much better inventory, much more thorough. And then where it says in the book we go back to the list. Jack said you go back to the bottom of the resentment and in three columns you go Back Through Your Life. You look to see as you did with resentment. Selfishness is the manifestation of all my defects which are categorized as resentment, selfish, dishonesty, self-seeking, and fear. And in three columns you look and see your selfishness where they wanted their way and you knuckled them under. Pat was in my resentment column one or two times. She was all over my selfishness. My kids were not on my resentment list. If I looked at my fourth column to see about my selfishnes, I would have not looked at myself with my kids. And I made them cut their hair short. I made him listen to my music. Why? so that I could have my way. There was no other reason and I couldn't see it until I saw it. Pat could explain it to me and I just built up my defenses. She goes to Al-Anon and she lets me live with my defenses and I cannot defend what I'm doing. I had a transformation from going through the steps then and then after a while I kept going to meetings and things seemed to be getting better and then I get promoted back into management. Stress, anxiety, go back through the steps again. And that's just the way it has been. And each time I go through the Steps, it is different. I'm 13 years sober. I had read the book Pass It On, and on page 350 to 354 they described why Bill wrote to 12 and 12, and it was to deepen and broaden the 12 steps that he had put into the big book. And the reason he wrote to 1112 was that he hadn't seen people get sober and stay sober in the big book from the big book and remain angry anxious depressed and filled with dread long after the high tide of active alcoholism had receded so he deepened the steps well i but he did but you gotta look for it you got and he explains anyway uh so i started through the steps again And, okay, the second part of the first step is I lack the power to manage my life, to have my way. The third part, I used to say the third half, but nobody got that joke. The third parte is on the first page of step one in the 12 and 12. Our admissions of our personal powerlessness becomes firm bedrock upon which happy and productive lives may be built. well and before that pass it on as Bill sees it on page 10 he says constructive meditation is the first requirement of each new step of spiritual growth so constructive meditation and in a constructive meditation I say I doubt if I'm powerless. I have personal power. I can decide to look at my clock. I can decided and then look at it. I have that power. But then it comes to me. Why do I have to touch it with my hands? Can I just levitate it with meditation? Well, no, I can't. Well, can you give yourself that power? Well, that's silly. I can not give myself that power. No, and you did not give yourself the power to choose to pick the phone up and you didn't give yourself the power to pick the phone up. Whatever you whatever power you have comes to you from some other source of power that's bedrock upon which you can look at a step where you come to believe that some power greater than yourself can restore you to sanity but you ain't going to get no power to do that except from the source of power which is a surrender and it comes to you and so it is And I came to believe in the pervasive presence and power of God. I had heard Chuck see, I'd follow him around and listen to him talk. And all the guys, Norm Alvey and Jack Daly and all those guys. Chuck could never remember my name, but when we shook hands and I thanked him, he always said, good to see you again, Howard, because he had asked somebody, who in the hell is that guy? He shows up all the time. What a deal. What a deal. And Chuck said that we have one problem and that is a conscious feeling of separation from God. And we have one answer and that is a conscious feeling of unity with God. Every problem has the same root cause. I want my way, not God's way. The solution is be in unity. And Chuck said, whether you're an al-anon or an al... He didn't say that. He said an alcoholic or a non-alcoholic alike. You cannot have the living answer unless you have a personally satisfactory conscious partnership with the creating spirit that creates you in every aspect of your life. It's a satisfactory partnership. So, I'm not going to have my way. but whatever way there is I have come to believe with Dr. Paul that that is the only way that it can be nothing, absolutely nothing goes wrong in God's world God isn't up in heaven intervening with what's happening for people that deserve it and those that don't God is always in the moment of creation and has been in this universe for 14 billion years. And whatever is happening is the best thing he can do with what he has to work with at that moment. If you've jumped off the Empire State Building, the best God can do without it is accelerate your fall at 32 foot per second every second until you hit the sidewalk. Then perhaps things get better. So it's a marvelous thing that somebody could come out with a completely demolished life out of the tattletale and find himself here in Maryland by the ocean with people that love me and that I love. there was an actress at a meeting once and she said to the girl next to me you see that lady back at the literature table she said I know all her secrets I know all her fears, I know all her resentments I know everything about her but what the hell's her name we know each other in our deepest selves we just don't know each other's names in the book on meditation it says whatever way you find God that's the right way if you analyze the laws of physics to become convinced that it's a manifestation of the profoundest reason and most radiant beauty in every aspect of all being. And that is your belief. That's right for you. Or if you're like Pat, who have always known that that's the way it is. And that life is the best it can be and it's going to get better. She just knows that. That's right for her. But this guy says, wherever you find God, mark that spot and go sit in that window again and again and again. The program of Alcoholics Anonymous is my window. That's where I found God passed, and that's where I sat in this window. Thank you for letting me share that. Thank you, Howard.