Talk Talk

Talk: To put into spoken words; utter; to speak emptily or trivially; chatter.

It comes as a shock to me to realize that I am not as interesting to other people as I am to myself. I try to remember this when I'm around someone with nothing to say who nonetheless insists on doing a lot of talking. I was at a large meeting last night where the same few people share every week and frankly, they'd be better off keeping quiet and listening to what someone else has to say. And I notice this, of course, because I think I have something profound to share but don't because I'm too humble, even though my thoughts are profound and revealing and spiced with hilarious and insightful anecdotes from my past.

I can't listen to what someone else is saying when I thinking about my reply. I see this in people's eyes all of the time when I'm talking; my experience as a sales guy has helped me perceive when someone is paying attention and when someone is not, which is distressingly often. I can almost hear the wheels turning and the gears grinding as the other person prepares his response. It's not worth talking to someone who is busy working on a brilliant riposte.

This is what I wanted to say last night. It's not nearly as profound as I thought it was at the time. And it took me most of the meeting to come up with it which means I wasn't listening to anyone else. It's unclear to me why I thought they weren't profound. I wasn't listening. Maybe they were saying things that I needed to hear.

This Program solves a lot of my problems as long as I'm diligent in working the principles of the 12 Steps. The spiritual principles of the 12 Steps. I came in with all kinds of difficult psychological and social deficiencies as a result of my drinking, and I was in a big hurry to solve them all. Some of them were deep-seated and wedged in but good, and I needed professional help to de-wedge them, but I learned to seek out this help in the process of working The Steps. I never had any luck in solving my problems if I wasn't trying to apply a spiritual solution. It's very tempting to say: "OK, I'm having a relationship problem and I'm going to concentrate on it and dabble in The Program on the side, because this is more important and I don't want to waste any of my valuable time screwing around with all of this arcane crap when I could be screaming at my wife."

I think that there are 12 Steps.