Definitions

Work: Sustained human effort to overcome obstacles and achieve a result.

The format for our Monday meeting is to read a paragraph out of The Big Book and use the reading as a basis for discussion.  Today the guy read the shortest paragraph in the first 164 pages (not verified but there is certainly none shorter): "It works - it really does!"  I find it interesting that the word "works" appears 31 times in the literature with "work" showing up an additional 130 times.  While some of these are in the context of going to a job many of them talk about the effort we have to put into our recovery.  It's work.  It's not leisure which by the way is not used at all . . . in any context . . .  anywhere in our books.

Balance:  Mental equilibrium; mental health; calmness, a state of remaining clear-headed and undisturbed.

The topic included the oh so important A.A. concept of balance, one of my favorite touchstones in my recovery.  I'm not all the way to the left and I'm not all the way to the right and I try to stay in the middle somewhere.  I didn't get sober to hang out in recovery rooms all the time but if I don't hang out in recovery rooms some of the time my mental equilibrium is disturbed.  Everything is no longer simply On and Off.  I can throttle shit up and I can downshift when it seems appropriate.

Isolate: To set apart or cut off from others.

We also dabbled with the idea of living life in our own heads.  If I go up there, in my noggin, I'm all alone in a bad neighborhood.  I need you people.  Even though you can irritate the shit out of me I need you.  I live my life in the real world and not in some dystopian nightmare hallucinated out of my darkness.

Quiet:  With little or no sound; free of disturbing noise; not talking much or not talking loudly.

In Alcoholics Anonymous we should addend this definition to say "or not talking at all."  If someone thinks you're stupid open your mouth and remove all doubt.  The idea is that I rarely make things worse by remaining silent while I often ruin something by talking.  So I keep quiet a lot of the time.  And when I do talk I measure my words carefully because they can have a big effect.  Sometimes, when I'm driven to say something I know I shouldn't say, I'm fascinated hearing to the stupid, inappropriate words coming out of my mouth even while my brain is saying: "This is stupid.  Why are you doing this again?  I told you not to do this and you're doing it anyway.  This is NOT going to work out well for you."

Serve: To be effective; to be useful to; to meet the needs of.

One of my morning Quiet Time affirmations is that I be shown how to be of service to someone.  This effort used to be restricted to alcoholics because that's the only people I was capable of helping.  Today I ask that I be given the strength and wisdom to be helpful to anybody.  We can be nice to everyone we run into.  We can try to make everyone's day better.