Destruction and Fatalities and Beatings, Oh, My

"You see yourself endlessly grasping for something, anything, to hold onto in the midst of all these shifting sands, and you see that there is nothing to hold onto, nothing that doesn't change.  You watch pleasurable experiences arise and fall and you see that they never last; you watch pain come uninvited and you watch yourself anxiously struggling to throw it off; you see yourself fail.  It all happens over and over while you stand back quietly and just watch it all work.  This is known as dukkha, the unsatisfactoriness of life.  You see the way suffering inevitably follows in the wake of clinging, as soon as you grasp anything, pain inevitably follows."   

"This feeling of being at one with God and man, this emerging from isolation through the open and honest sharing of our terrible burden of guilt, brings us to a resting point . . . "  Step Five, 12&12

I'm always tickled when I remember that many people believe that our Twelve Steps came out of the six principles that guided the Washingonians.  I can imagine a scenario where Bill W thought: "Wow, those six principles are just perfect" and then sitting for a while before deciding to add six more.  I'm surprised he didn't get up to twenty or thirty Steps.  If one is good then a hundred is better, right?  What ever I'm dealing with I can see no problem with just doubling it.  It has got to be better.  It reminds me of the survey Central Office sent out during the Fellowship's formative years asking each of the groups to send along their membership rules and receiving like forty-two thousand rules.  I have a great complicator.  I can complicate the shit out of anything.

Here are some words found on one page of Step Six: Fatal obsession.  Destroy their lives.  Self-destruction.  Destroy himself (so that's three times with the destroying yourself).  Terrific beating administered by alcohol.  Destruction and fatalities and beatings.  Wow, why did I decide to give all of that goodness up?

A few weeks ago a young man got on the highway near where I live and drove for a bit going the wrong way before slamming head-on into another car and killing two men.  He complained of some back pain.  Well, he's going to have plenty of time to rest that back in the years he's going to spend in prison.