I like to watch people grow and develop as their recovery progresses. I note that most meetings are comprised of people with under five years of sobriety and those of us who have been sober twenty years or more. My perception is that we lose a lot of people at the five to seven year mark. I'm not saying these people drink or that they regress into some prelapsarian state of moral decay but that it gets easier and more boring - once the dramatic gains of the early years are in the past and the obsession to drink isn't a cute any more - to slack off on recovery. It can seem more like an unnecessary choir than a sanity/sobriety requirement.
This, I think, is a shame. I love seeing dramatic surges of spiritual growth in members who are over the five year mark; an admittedly arbitrary number but one that holds water in a lot of cases. There are a handful of members at my home group that I've seen pass through the chore stage and really blossom as individuals. There is an aura of peace and lightness and good energy and deep seated contentment around them that makes them a joy to be around. And it doesn't stop there. I know of a couple of people who came to realizations when they were well over ten years sober that made a huge difference in their lives - one finally decided he was happier single and removed himself from the dating game; the other shifted her meeting schedule from Chore to Privilege, realizing that she just felt better after attending a meeting and started coming more often, on a whim, instead of slotting her attendance into a grim, unbending schedule.
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