Getting out of the groove

A series of accidents has led me to miss a lot of my home group 6 AM meetings over the last few weeks.  Weather, car trouble, getting blocked in by neighbors  -- just a whole series of frustrating little things that have added up to an average of only 2 meetings a week for the last 3 weeks rather than my usual 6 per week.  Now, in the last 2 days, I have overslept once and misread my clock once, missing 2 meetings I could easily have made.  I've kept up with other aspects of my program, especially emphasizing the 11th Step, but I can feel the unraveling. 

This leads me to think about just how frighteningly easy it is to get out of the groove.  One of the members of my home group went out after 12 years and in the 3 years she's been back has given a lot of thought to how it happened.  She likes to describe how she systematically dismantled her program, beginning with meetings.  First missing a meeting was unavoidable, then it was acceptable, then it seemed like a good idea.  Then she drank and was out for 7 years.

Now that is scary.  I have got to make a phone call or 2 today and get to tomorrow's meeting.  And, if I see that woman, thank her again for scaring me.

Contingent Promises, Learning to Play and Love

We are all familiar with 'the Promises' of AA from pages 83 - 84 of the Big Book:

If we are painstaking about this phase of our development, we will be amazed before we are half way through. We are going to know a new freedom and a new happiness. We will not regret the past nor wish to shut the door on it. We will comprehend the word serenity and we will know peace. No matter how far down the scale we have gone, we will see how our experience can benefit others. That feeling of uselessness and self pity will disappear. We will lose interest in selfish things and gain interest in our fellows. Self-seeking will slip away. Our whole attitude and outlook upon life will change. Fear of people and of economic insecurity will leave us. We will intuitively know how to handle situations which used to baffle us. We will suddenly realize that God is doing for us what we could not do for ourselves.

Are these extravagant promises? We think not. They are being fulfilled among us—sometimes quickly, sometimes slowly. They will always materialize if we work for them.

Dave, the other principal author of this blog, absolutely hates it when this is read at the beginning of meetings. He points out that it is always taken out of context.

Connected

Recently I've been going through one of my bouts of feeling pretty ineffective - basically useless.  Unemployment can do that to you, especially when you don't have your spiritual ducks in row.
Now, I know the standard response to such a feeling is "get off the pity pot" or "get your ass to a meeting" or something like that.  That advice can be useful, but it also helps (me, at least) to try to look objectively at the situation and see just how much of the problem is purely in my head.  (I almost wrote "is real as opposed to in my head" but, as any alkie knows, a problem in your head can be a very, very real problem.)  After looking over the situation I may come up with a way to work on it or I may decide it isn't that much of a problem after all.

Listening and empathy

According to an article recently published in Scientific American (http://goo.gl/QgUn5) "Analysis of some 14,000 college student surveys over the last three decades finds that self-reported levels of empathy for others have decreased."  Fully 75% of college students scored themselves lower in empathy than students of 30 years ago.  
According to the article, "one possible explanation is social isolation—we tend to do more things on our own and engage in fewer group activities than we used to. Another possible cause is a decrease in reading fiction for pleasure. Studies have found that the number of stories preschoolers read correlates with their ability to understand other people’s emotional states."
Which brings me to one of the great benefits of meetings - especially speaker meetings.  Hearing other alcoholics stories and following the rule of 'identify, don't compare' helps us learn to feel how others feel.  This opens us up to ending our alcoholic isolation and learning to love.  It is yet another example of AA swimming against some of the negative currents in today's world.
Very nice.

Meetings are good; the 11th Step is essential

Last night an AA I recently met told me that he tried to stop drinking for 23 years.  All that time he came to AA meetings and followed the advice he kept getting: "Just don't drink and come to meetings."  He kept pointing out to people that this wasn't exactly working for him and the reply was pretty much always "keep coming back."  Finally someone suggested that he try working the Steps.  For 23 years the only tool he was offered was meetings.  Using the Steps he has now been sober for 5 years.