A friend of mine with a solid twenty-five years of sobriety asked me recently about my daily or Tenth Step inventory (ies). She has been struggling a little bit in her recovery program as in: "I'm sick of going to A.A. meetings." I can not be more sympathetic. I figure I've been to seven or eight thousand meetings in my thirty-eight years which probably means - given my proclivity to lie - that I've been to five or six thousand. In any case, a lot of meetings. Getting sick of meetings is part and parcel of long-term sobriety. I called her the next day to follow up on her request. She answered the phone and said she was meeting with her sponsor. I said I didn't give a shit and she should ditch her sponsor and talk to me instead. She was laughing as she hung the phone up in my ear. This is as it should have been and - not only was I not surprised, given the tone and timbre of our relationship - I laughed for a bit myself. That's the last I heard of it although she has been back attending regularly and with a much more relaxed attitude.
Does anyone else miss that satisfying Thwack! that used to accompany the slamming down of the phone in someone else's ear? All cell phone hang-ups sound the same . . .
My daily inventory is not the slog that it used to be and this is because my behavior is generally pretty decent and I am not making this up. I don't have a lot of bad behavior to clean-up anymore. If I don't behave well I try to correct things immediately. I don't lie in bed reviewing my behavior before drifting off to sleep and often think: "Wow, I need to clean that mess up." Fewer messes = Fewer clean-ups on Aisle 3 and Quicker Clean-Ups = Fewer Foetid, Rotting Messes to clean-up the next day.
I'm seeing how this works more and more clearly . . .
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