It's STILL All About Me

I was at one of my regular meetings last night. I shared, and I was brilliant. I guess at this juncture that I don't have to point that out any more. I'm always brilliant when I share. My remarks are cutting, insightful, humorous, deeply profound yet accessible to even the simplest of minds. I help everyone. It no longer bothers me that no one has ever told me these things, but I know them to be true, and I am not often wrong. If I think it, if it exists in my mind, it must be fact.

Anyway, there were some friends at the meeting that I wanted to talk to and there was also a guy who looked newish: arrived a little late, sat by himself, passed on the reading, typical new guy stuff. I remember approaching my first hard-ass sponsor in Indy after a meeting to complain about something that if I had been talking to him on the phone regularly he would have already known about. I had a few months clean and sober at that point.

He spun me around. "You see that man over there?" he said. "He's brand new. Go talk to him." This was code for "Get away from me -- the meeting is for me, too." The message I learned is that the new guy is the main guy. Even the rookies among us have something to share.

The Book suggests that we will run into people that we'll need to encourage to talk by sharing our own story, and that there will be people who need to talk. This guy needed to talk, god bless him, and he wasn't very interesting. He didn't come up for a breath once in 2o minutes. I didn't have to pay close attention to what he was saying. I tried to interject a comment from time to time but could see that he was taking a break to formulate what he wanted to say next: he was not listening to me. We're all like that when we come in. None of us are interesting. We have all done the same things and they aren't nearly as interesting to other people as we think they are.

There's a story of a man coming into a club house and sitting down. He turns to the right and asks: " How long have you been sober?"
"30 years."
He turns to the left: "How long have you been sober?"
"30 days."

He thinks for a minute, then looks at the guy with 30 days: "How did you do it?"

How, indeed.