Zooming Along

My buddy Willie gave a Zoom lead for one of my California meetings yesterday from the comfort of his office in Columbus.  That's a tough challenge, talking for 45 minutes to a group of mostly expressionless and often distracted people.  One of the problems with Zoom is that you lose the feedback that makes the sharing so salutary.  The other problem, of course, is that people engage in activities they'd never do in meetings: walking around, looking at a screen off to the side (and yes, you're not hiding anything when you do this).  You tell a joke and you get a bunch of stone-faced people, muted, half of whom are looking at their phone.

I had to laugh at the flow of his talk.  He's a musician.  His sensibilities were on raw display.  It was like watching someone compose a piece of music: he'd go off on a thread, abandon it to come back to a core theme, veer off in another direction for a while and really get into it, wander back to the first thread, one he didn't like intially, and add a little something that made it work, and on and on.  Dude was all over the place.  It was a good talk but it was chaos.

When I give a lead - a good, logical, technical, German engineer - it's like watching a bolus of plastic pellets move down a production line before ending up as a rear view mirror for a Buick.  No wasted motion, no detours, A to Z, baby.  Efficient and precise.

Thank god we are so diverse.

I've been going to meetings for 34 years and I'm still amazed when I hear something I haven't heard before.  In the last week I heard three new things.

As you search for your conception of a Higher Power it's not "I'll believe it when I see it" but the other way around: "I'll see it when I believe it."  Make a start on your spirituality.  Don't think about it too much.  You'll get there.  Fake it.  Try anything, try everything.

As we try to find a Higher Power attendance at meetings is so important: "God doesn't talk to me directly - he talks to me through you guys."  This was from a man who I watched logically resist every attempt to find his Higher Power.

About prayer: "Prayer doesn't change God - it changes the person who is doing the praying."  I like this one because my Program stagnated a bit because of my stubborn refusal to pray for the longest time, preferring the much cooler meditation.  Also important but more powerful when combined with prayer and the self-examination inventory.