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Made a Decision

(43)

"Veni, Vidi, Velcro . . . 

I came, I saw, I stuck around."

Perhaps my Higher Power's greatest personal gift to me, on that lucky day when I arrived in AA, was to render me teachable - perhaps for the first time in my life.

By that time alcohol had beaten my every effort to control or quit it, so I had become willing to do what I was told. 

Also, once inside the rooms of AA, I saw what those around me had - and I wanted it.  I didn't just want a piece of it, either. Being an alcoholic who then lived by the motto - "More is better " - I wanted all of it. 

(And I wanted it in a paper bag to go, so that I could get on with my life and not have to keep going to all those meetings. I soon learned it doesn't work that way.)

I was told in meetings, "Don't leave AA before the miracle happens." 

I wanted my miracle  

(not yet realizing my being safe and sober in AA was in itself a miracle), 

so purely by the Grace of God I became willing to "go to any lengths" to get it. 

 How about you?

                      Are you convinced?

                          Are you still wondering if you really are an alcoholic?

                               Are you teachable?

Here's an AA saying that may apply: 

           "If you think you have a problem with alcohol, you probably do." 

People without an alcohol problem don't sit around wondering if they have a problem with alcohol. Untreated alcoholics, do.

People without an alcohol problem really don't spend much time thinking about alcohol - period. 

Here's how our Big Book defines it:

"When you honestly want to quit drinking and find that you can't, or if when drinking you have little control over the amount you take, you are probably an alcoholic. If that be the case, you may be suffering from an illness which only a spiritual experience will conquer."  Alcoholics Anonymous, 4th Edition

So what does that kind of defeat feel like? 

According to our AA World Services, it feels a lot like the way I felt when I got here: "Defeated, and knowing it, I arrived at the doors of A.A., alone and afraid of the unknown. A power outside of myself had ... guided me through the doors of Alcoholics Anonymous.

"Once inside A.A. I experienced a sense of being loved and accepted, something I had not felt since early childhood. May I never lose the sense of wonder I experienced on that first evening with A.A., the greatest event of my entire life."

To keep that feeling, to be IN and stay IN the program of AA, requires commitment and courage. Grit, if you will, plus the determination to do what's necessary to stay sober and improve one's life (and the lives of others) in the process.

As the inspirational author Darlene Larson Jenks so truthfully wrote: 

"To do nothing is failure. To try, and in the trying you make some mistakes and then you make some positive changes as a result of those mistakes, is to learn and to grow and to blossom." 

All of us in AA are "blossoms" living on borrowed time, time we would not even have had without the grace of God and our program of recovery.

Most of us, with some exceptions, arrive in AA in middle age with the emotional age of teenagers, because our maturing process ended when we began drinking and drugging.

(We won't believe we're middle aged, either. But if you get sober- say - in your 40s, isn't that more than halfway to being 80-something? Do the maths!)

Do we want to make up for the time we've wasted in the past? 

Do our lives now have a sense of purpose? 

Are we going to make what time we have left count for A.A.?

I sure hope so, because none of us knows how much time we have left. 

I realize this may sound a bit grim, but being a genuine old person I can promise you old age will also arrive for you one day, and it won't slowly creep up on you, either.

 Old age arrives in the blink of an eye. 

Example:

Let's say you are now a "middle-aged" youngster, still feeling good, frisky, and able to get into all kinds of trouble without much effort, even without the use of mind-altering chemicals. You might have more soreness than you used to on the day following some hard physical work, but it's no big deal ... 

And then ...

You happen to own a pickup truck and one sunny day you decide to clean out the truck bed. You get in, sweep and make it ready to hose out. You start to jump down to get the hose, but suddenly your brain shouts, "Whoa."

    Standing on the tailgate looking down at what is suddenly a great distance, you decide it might be better to sit down and slide off it onto your feet.

                              Congratulations! 

              Your doorway into old age has just arrived!

 Or at least - with hindsight - that's how it arrived for me. Your future will hold something similar and, I can promise you, it will arrive a lot sooner than you expect it to.

So the big question is -  are you going to stay sober to do all the things you want to do - and should do, and can do - before your time runs out?

We all can, especially when we don't forget our one days at a time will eventually come to an end. 

But staying focused isn't always easy. We often become so busy with "life" we forget the only reason we have our busy productive life is because we are sober. 

(A quote I like reads: "Don't let the life AA gave you take you away from your life in AA.")

Or we can put off doing today what we think we'll get around to doing tomorrow, because time is such an easy thing to piddle away. 

Learning to budget our time - like our money - is an important part of recovery. 

We can get full value out of each and every sober day just by daily doing-the-doing that we learn and practice in A.A. 

              It's all worth it, too, because living a sober life rocks - at any age!