There's a dude that attends my regular meeting who has been sober over 40 years. Like many of us he marches to his own weird, abstract drummer. We don't have a lot of people that march to normal, 2/4 beat drummers. There's a lot of improvisation going on. Every few years he goes on a hiatus from Alcoholics Anonymous, as in: no meetings at all. He doesn't stop a recovery program, he just stays out of The Rooms. Personally, I never thought this was a great idea. It might work for him but I never liked the suggestion that not attending A.A. was the best idea for most of us.
A few years ago I grabbed him after a meeting to get a more in-depth take on his strategy. His belief is that A.A. can become a mindless time-filler for him, a habit without much depth to it, where he isn't paying close attention to the substance of the meetings. I started to get a better understanding at where he was coming from. I mean . . . I can read How It Works in a meeting while I'm holding an internal discussion with myself. I'm not paying any attention at all to the text I'm reading.
On these two long trips where I had no access to meetings I found that my mind relaxed without the time constraints of the whole meeting experience. I picked up new habits, I worked on different things, I had time for activities that may have been helping me grow spiritually, mentally, emotionally because I wasn't tied in to this routine of sitting in meetings that had become increasingly rote and uninspiring and consequently frustrating and unfulfilling.
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