People, Can We All Just Get Along?

Society: Any organized group of people joined together because of some interest in common.


I'm repeating myself here, saying the same things over and over because I can't remember what I did 20 minutes ago let alone last week, but I think often of the time early in my sobriety when I tried to refuse a service position by explaining that I didn't drink coffee at night.  Why would I come to a meeting early to make coffee for other people, especially when I wasn't going to be paid or at least lavishly praised?  Never mind the criticizing about the bad coffee that I endured; I'm glad I didn't know that was coming.  


This was how I perceived the world: as a Zero Sum Game.  There was a certain amount of everything and my goal was to accumulate as large a pile as possible.  I was vaguely aware that this would come at the expense of the piles of other people, but I didn't care about other people at that point.  I certainly wasn't going to take anything off of my pile to give to anyone else.  I had done a lot of work to build that pile.


More from the minor Buddhist: "You've got to see your own place in society and your function as a social being.  You've got to see your duties and obligations to your fellow human beings, and above all, your responsibility to yourself as an individual living with other individuals."


Man, does that sound like The Fellowship.  That's nothing more than a fancy rewording of the First Tradition, which cautions us that the individual is never more important than the organization as a whole.


And I don't want to harp on the Buddhist tradition, either.  The Bible is filled with examples of Jesus serving others.  I can almost hear him muttering under his breath as he washed the feet of the disciples: "Do I have to show these idiots everything?  MY feet are killing me, my bunions need a good massaging, and I could use a new pair of sandals from Columbia."  He knew the showing was better than the telling.


Those damn disciples, anyway.