Revealing a Little Bit at a Time

I'm constantly amazed at how difficult it is for new people to share what's going on in their lives.  We really seem to resist sharing the nuts and bolts, the mundane minutiae of our lives with other people.  I chat frequently with a 45 year old guy - the man who was raised in foster care and does not know who his parents are - who has been in an on again/off again relationship with a woman in A.A. for a long time.  I love both of them and think they're good people trying to learn how to maintain a healthy relationship after enduring difficult childhoods and then drinking at life for many years.  Here's the thing . . . the manifestation of how hard new people make it to help them . . . I am constantly flummoxed to hear that the relationship - it was definitely over last week or was it definitely back on last week, I can't keep track of all the sudden, jarring twists and turns, feints and weaves - is back without a word or a hint being shared, with me, anyway.  The episode that made me laugh, ruefully, anyway, was hearing that my buddy came home one day to find all of his stuff in a pile out in the garage - that relationship sounded over to me - and then receiving a few pictures of them happily hanging out together.  WTF, right?

I don't believe that he's being purposefully deceptive or trying to hide something - I think he doesn't consider bringing anyone else into whatever conversation he's having with the world.  I know I didn't.  I had parents who weren't that engaged in my life - and that's on me as much as it's on them - so I was used to doing whatever I wanted, whatever I thought was best, all of the time.

That's Going to Work?

"As we go through our day we pause if we feel upset or filled with doubt, and ask for the right thought or action.  We constantly remind ourselves that we are no  longer running the show.  We say to ourselves many times each day, 'Thy will be done'  We are then in much less danger of dear, anger, worry, self-pity, or foolish decisions.  We become much more efficient.  We do not tire as easily, because we are not burning up energy foolishly like we did when we were trying to control everything in our lives without help from a Higher Power.

It works - it really does."

I can just hear the new person saying: "What?!  That's not going to work.  Are you telling me that works?"

I like that the word foolish shows up twice.

Foolish:  Someone or something lacking good sense, judgement, or discretion, often appearing silly, unwise, or irrational.

Courage

Often life goes in a direction I couldn't have imagined.  The question then becomes: how do I react when this happens?  Am I open to seeing that life had better plans for me than I did?  Or do I mourn and grieve and bitch and lament, thinking that everything would have been better if only this had happened?

This is a rhetorical question.  Of course I mourn and grieve and bitch and lament.  Just for not as long as I used to.

From our Daily Reflections: "One of the definitions of courage is the willingness to do the right thing in spite of fear.  Courage, then, is not necessarily the absence of fear."  Courage implies firmness of mind and will.  Courage is the ability to control fear and be willing to deal with something that is dangerous, difficult, or unpleasant.

Yeah, well, there's some scary shit out there.  Fear can be productive.  I was messing around with the electrical connection on a cheap lamp I bought in a developing country when it occurred to me that there were three possible outcomes: 1. I blow a fuse and burn the house down.  2.  I electrocute myself.  3.  I throw the thing away.  Please note that none of the options include me successfully fixing the lamp.  There was no way that was going to happen.

"When I was drinking, I deceived myself about reality, rewriting it to what I wanted it to be.  Deceiving others is a character defect, even if it is just stretching the truth a bit or cleaning up my motives so others will think well of me.  In other words, I have begun not practicing deception."

"Remember . . . it's not a lie if you believe it."  

George Costanza explaining how he was going to beat a lie detector machine.  When Jerry asked him how he could do the same thing George scoffed and said: "That's like going up to Pavarotti and saying: 'Teach me to sing like you do.' "

The NEW Promises. The Old Promises REVISED. Something!

Here are our beloved Promises from the Plain Language Big Book:

"If we are painstaking about Step Nine, we will be amazed before we have made amends to half of our list of people.  We will find new freedom and new happiness.  We will not regret the past or wish we could forget about it.  We will understand the word serenity and we will know peace.

No matter how badly we have behaved in the past, we will begin to see how our experience can benefit others.  Any feelings of uselessness and self-pity will disappear.  We will lose interest in selfish things and begin to take an interest in helping other people.  Self-seeking will slip away.  Our whole attitude and outlook about life will change.  Fear of people and of money worries will leave us.  We will know how to handle situations which used to confuse or worry us.  We will suddenly realize that God is doing for us what we could not do for ourselves.

Are these extravagant promises?  We think not!  These promises come true among A.A. members every day - sometimes quickly, sometimes slowly.  They will always come into our lives if we work for them."

Work?  Work?  Nobody said anything about work!

Sometimes real fucking slowly.

I have always objected to the assertion that these are not extravagant promises.  I think that they're extremely extravagant.  They're extravagant as hell.

I really like that the qualifier "before we are halfway through" is further explained to mean half way through the amends process.  There has been a lot of confusion about that over the years.

I note that a lot of the phrases translate word for word from the original text.  In the new version, of course, the Traditions and the Steps are not changed.  Old-timers are howling already at the apostasy of changing one word from the original book.  I can only imagine the riots that would occur if we tried to modernize the Steps.

As a kid who grew up in a Protestant church let me draw this analogy to those of you who are offended at this new offering of literature: church services were conducted in Latin - to a largely illiterate population, mind you, meaning the priest could be saying whatever he wanted because none of his parishioners could read a word  - until the 15th century.  Catholics didn't switch to the vernacular until the 1960s, for heaven's sake.  Then, the first translation was called the King James version and was packed with thous and thees and shalt nots and a lot of other stilted, old-timey language.  Eventually, this was replaced by a series of revised versions but not until the start of the 20th century.  At one point my very religious, extremely conservative parents bought me a Bible - which I read several times - that was meant to appeal to people who were a lot younger.  The cover featured hip, happy and attractive young people.  So where does this lead me as I ponder the outrage over the Plain Language Big Book?  I'm very, very, very tolerant.  I'm finding the reading to be completely inoffensive.  I don't think anything material has changed.  The message is the same - just written in the vernacular using words and phrases common in 21st century dialogue.

Big, Big Words

Resentment: A complex, long-lasting emotion combining anger, bitterness, and disappointment, often stemming from feeling unfairly treated, wronged, or underappreciated.  Experiencing a resentment is reliving an offense that injured you in the past. (The italics are mine.)   

I find it very affirming in my spiritual quests to see the same concepts repeated across the ages and shared among different philosophies and religions.  I was struck dumb recently at a Toltec passage about how nefarious and damaging resentments are to our psyche. Then, the passage quoted from the Big Book in today's Daily Reflection, is another big fan favorite: "Resentment is the 'number one' offender.  It destroys more alcoholics than anything else.  From it stems all forms of spiritual disease, for we have been not only mentally and physically ill, we have been spiritually sick."

Again, I love the choice of words: offender, destroys, spiritual disease.  Big words, big, big words with a lot of oomph behind them.  Hard to misinterpret the concept of being destroyed.

The Book is Packed

When that happens, our great natural assets, the instincts, have turned into physical and mental liabilities.

To define the word 'harm' in a practical way, we might call it the result of instincts in collision, which caused physical, mental, emotional, or spiritual damage to people.

Yet these instincts .  .  . often far exceed their natural function.   

Whenever a human being becomes a battleground for the instincts, there can be no peace.

Such is the power of the instincts to overreach themselves.

For every time a person imposes his instincts unreasonably upon others, unhappiness follows.

Unreasonable fear that our instincts will not be satisfied leads us to covet the possessions of others, to lust for sex and power, to become angry when our instinctive demands are threatened, to be envious when the ambitions of others seem to be realized while ours are not.

Instincts restored to true purpose!

Once again, look at those dang words: battleground, unreasonable (twice, mind you), angry, threatened, envious, no peace, damage.  What if I was given this option to start my day: you will spend all of your  time waging an invisible war in an internal battleground, fueled by angry, threatened, envious emotions that threaten any possibility of peace.  Sounds like a plan, a shitty plan, gotta be a better plan than that.  And I love the idea of trying to impose my demands and will on others . . . and doing it because I perceive, sometimes correctly, often not, that others are doing better than I am.  No shit!  There are always going to be people out there who are on an easier track than I am.

Instincts On Rampage

How instincts can exceed their proper function.

The collision of instincts can produce anything from a cold snub to a blazing revolution.

We have learned that the satisfaction of instincts cannot be the sole end and aim of our lives.

If we place instincts first, we have got the cart before the horse; we shall be pulled backward into disillusionment.

When the satisfaction of our instincts for sex, security, and society becomes the sole object of our lives, then pride steps in to justify our excesses.

By now the newcomer has probably arrived at the following conclusions: that his character defects, representing instincts gone astray, have been the primary cause of his drinking and failure at life.

Here's an interesting factoid: the words instinct and instincts appear about 35 times in our literature and all but two are in the 12&12.  Moreover, the two times they appear in the Big Book they are not referencing our own personal instincts.  Apparently, after a few years the founders started to be suspicious that they had really missed something important when they were writing the book.  Fair enough - it was sort of dicey and experimental at the start.  Dr. Bob had at least one seance at his house, for chrissake.

Here's one of my favorite lines in the literature: "Instincts on rampage balk at investigation."

Rampage: A period of violent, reckless, or destructive behavior, often involving a person or group rushing around frantically.  It signifies uncontrolled rage and chaos.  Synonyms include frenzy, rage, and uproar.

Bill loved those kinds of images.  He loved to portray alcoholism in graphic, powerful words and images.  I have instincts.  My instincts like to riot violently.  C'mon, whether or not you're a Bill W fan that's some pretty cool shit.

Instincts:  A way of thinking, behaving, or feeling that is not learned; a subconscious, automatic impulse driven by biological survival needs.

Instincts gone astray, exceeding their proper function, with the result that life is deeply, deeply unsettling and painful.  In fact, this state of mind leads to a deeply, deeply unhappy life, to "disillusionment."  I love the words and phrases: collision, battleground, blazing revolution, physical and mental liabilities.  I get the sense that because the instincts weren't properly addressed at the start that the founders really let 'er rip when the 12&12 was written.

Pride: A complex emotion and concept generally defined as a deep sense of pleasure, satisfaction or self-respect.

So pride appears in the literature like a billion times .  .  . I've really started to go down the wormhole.  I better be careful with all this cross-referencing.

Rampage would be an excellent, excellent name for a heavy metal band.