Life Depends On It

Tradition 9

By Anon.

I was intrigued by the organization of this meeting I had been “invited” to attend. The secretary seemed to take no notes, created no Minutes, and there appeared to be no real agenda, just people talking and chiming in from all over the place. Her aide, the guy at her right, in the seat of honor and power, or so I had surmised, said and did nothing the entire hour – that was the job I would try to land for sure. If I had to attend these meetings to try to keep “she who must be obeyed” (my wife) off my back, then the easiest job available had my name written all over it.

Of course the reality of the “not drinking part,” the purpose of these meetings, was lost on me, and caused me to continue to sink deeper and deeper into my disease. When that changed, thanks to an actual miracle of sobriety, in every sense of the word, months later, through no fault or action of my own, except daily 7:00 a.m. meetings, it began to dawn on me how clueless I was in those first few days about how meetings really worked. As the sober days began to pile up into years, I saw how trusted servants volunteered their time, sometimes at a sponsor’s subtle elbow or nod, to help make things happen every day, 365 times a year, rain or shine. I was even told how, on the morning of 9/11 when the horrors of the Twin Towers and elsewhere were being told in real time the meeting continued, after a brief Group Conscience. After all, sober men and women deal with tragedy a bit better than those not, at least so seems the belief.

In my own recovery I took hard the lesson that if the man to whom the Twelfth Step efforts were directed did not “get it,” we were to move on to the next still-suffering alcoholic. This seemed so hard to me as I read those words in the Big Book. Its authors had recovered. They told us how they did it. They shared their stories, some quite vivid and desperate, promising no matter how far down the scale we might have gone, our experience could help another. So why would we leave the one who did not “get it” behind? Why would we, how could we, abandon even that one? The story of the shepherd going to any lengths to save one sheep astray from the flock was a reverberating counterpoint.

But it was I who did not get it.

As time passed, I realized those who seemed to make it did so because of something within them, something driving them to survive. No one was able to instill that drive within me and I realized I could likewise not instill it in the next man. He or she had to want it all on their own. I could only carry the message. Not make him or her hear it, not make them follow it, not make them live it. So too it seemed with those meetings I attended.

While my Home Group has not changed, often my schedule gives me other alternatives. I have found that those meetings where I “want what they have” all seem to have that same sense of a drive to survive. They seem compelled to do the next right thing as a group to keep their attraction alive.That is not because they just have the best array of cookies or a variety of organic teas, although rigorous honesty demands the acknowledgment I do not find them to be detractions. But it means they have a sense of purpose palatable to me. Hands are quick to be raised for help with cleaning up or grab an open commitment. The awkward silence of waiting for a volunteer, if present, is short. Also, the people in those rooms seem to exude genuine caring, many might call it love for those about them, Particularly ones who might be suffering, whether with just 24 hours or decades of sobriety. They realize that living life on life’s terms is not always easy and  awareness is evident in how they participate in the meeting. That attraction is infectious to me. I seek out those meetings. I return to them. I survive because of them.

I have come to believe they survive because of the same reasons I was drawn to the program in the beginning. Their members share the exact same reality I experienced – that to drink is to die. They know, truly, that the statistics are against the alcoholic’s victory over their disease. So, in the same way for me: Life Depends On It. I see too the life and longevity of a meeting depends on living this reality, one meeting at a time.