SuperSonic Stevie

Urgent Message from the CDC:  Excessive drinking can cause short term memory loss.  Also, it can cause short term memory loss.

Give:  To make a present or gift of.
Take:  To get into one's hands, possession, or control, with or without force.

One of my favorite spiritual topics: Giving versus Taking.  I have always had a rough idea what it meant to be a giving person.  I aspired to being that kind of person and often believed that I was, but deep down inside I was suspicious of my motives.  Probably because my actions were so shitty.  It's like seeing a guy with a gun and bag marked "Loot" or "Swag" outside of a jewelry store that has an alarm clanging.  Whether or not he intended to rob the store is of no important.  The cops are going to judge him on his actions.

There's a passage suggesting that we judged our behavior by our intentions while the world was looking at our actions.

I do know that I learned about giving and service in The Program.  While service is a spiritual concept it was a concept too nuanced for me to perceive at the start.  If someone had tried to explain that spiritual actions lead to a spiritual experience I would have looked over their right ear with a 1000 yard stare.  But if I saw someone with a bunch of time swabbing out a coffee pot after a meeting . . . for free . . . and with no recognition from anyone unless it was an oldtimer complaining because the job was being bungled I thought: "Hmmmm.  MUST be something going on here," especially because the coffee-swabber, taking incoming fire, was happy.  I was drinking coffee someone else made and not cleaning anything and I was miserable.

Like many things in my life that have improved since I entered The Fellowship the concept of service has become clear only after I started trying to be of service.  Telling me that I will feel better if I start doing thing for other people with no expectation of a quid pro quo sounds like bullshit.  Then some particularly cruel sponsors suggest doing these nice things anonymously.   That still sounds like total bullshit.

But . . . there you go.

I have a friend who went to the Air Force Academy and spent his time in the military flying supersonic jet fighter planes before heading off to a major airline where he now flies 747s.  He tells the story of trying to fend off a persistent sponsor who was prodding him to finish his 4th Step: "Let me get this straight: you can fly a jet at 500 MPH 300 feet off the ground, and you're afraid of starting your writing?"

Sort of ended the conversation, I would imagine.  I hope my pilot buddy wasn't flying his plane upside down, too.