Core Competencies

I am continuing to struggle with this bout of free-floating anxiety which I hypothesize has something to do with people in my life . . . you know . . . dying.  But I'm not at all positive about this - I can't usually find my car keys so trying to come up with some great overview of my current emotional state doesn't rate especially high as one of my core competencies.

I will say this: I am not at all patient right now.  Since I'm almost never patient the fact that I recognize special impatience is really saying something.

My regular morning meeting is close to our downtown area so we get a steady stream of patrons that may or may not be there for recovery.  We see homelessness and mental illness - often in one jittery package -  at almost every meeting.  Generally, we're cool with this - if someone wants to grab a cup of coffee and sit quietly we're not going to throw them out.  We're trying to keep the minimum requirement for membership as low as possible.  We want the doors to recovery to be wide, wide open.

The other day a clearly crazy guy was in the meeting.  He had a big sheaf of papers clutched to his chest.  After a bit he went over to our literature rack, took some brochures on recovery, and made his way back to his seat where he began to shuffle and organize everything that he had in a manner that I can only assume made sense to him.  He started to take the staples out of the brochures and add the disconnected pages to various piles.  The meeting is kind of a quiet place so the rustling obviously began to bother people.

I got up and walked across the room, took a seat next to him.

"You've got to stop rustling the papers," I said quietly.  I didn't want to make him feel bad - he can't feel great on a good day - and I didn't want to disrupt the meeting.

"OK," he said, quickly putting everything in one big pile.  He reached over and squeezed my shoulder to show there weren't any hard feelings and I patted him on the leg.  I was uncomfortable.  I mean - who made me president of The Fellowship?  That's a trick question - I'm self-appointed.  But I have been sober for a while so I've run into a lot of different situations in the past and I feel some responsibility to help behavior in the meeting place stay appropriate. I think this is part of the job of an old-timer.

He started rustling things around again near the end of the meeting.  You could see he just couldn't help himself.  A lot of people came up to thank me for what I did, relieving some of my anxiety, but still . . . I wish it always worked perfectly, no upsets and no controversy.

Yeah, right.  This IS The Fellowship after all.