I'm reading through the stories section of The Big Book, Third Edition. I haven't read them from start to finish in a long time. I think the stories are most helpful to newer people. The text of the first 164 pages can be somewhat confusing and abstruse but all of us find a story or two or even three that we can really relate to, one where we say: "Wow. That sounds like me. That's what I did." We identify and don't feel so separate. And this is one of the themes that arises over and over - this sense of apartness, that we were standing off to the side, all by ourselves, while everyone else had some kind of game plan or playbook that they used to figure out the rules to go through the day.
Other themes:
Leave me alone. Get outta my face, I'm not bothering anyone but myself.
A vague sense that we weren't doing ourselves any good.
The relief when we found a group of people that felt like we did, that we weren't a unique freak of nature.
The relief when we understood that we aren't all there is, that Something was bigger than we were, and the immense relief this provided when we saw that we didn't have to run the world any more.
No comments:
Post a Comment