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Sunday, December 5, 2021

 

Made a Decision

(42)

                                Meeting Makers Make It

A couple of facts for you: 

 (1) The first alcoholic drink showed up about 9,000 years ago in China. We took to it right away.

(2) Ethanol (alcohol) today remains the most abused drug in the world. 

After I had been sober for a few years I began to think I didn't need to go to more than one meeting a week.

 (Yes, I really thought that). 

So I did that for a while.

 Before long that became one meeting every other week. Eventually I was only getting to meetings sporadically, when I felt like it. 

Shortly after that I became suicidal. 

That's because alcoholism is a three-part illness - spiritual, physical and MENTAL. We treat all three components by attending our AA meetings.

Surviving that few-meetings experience taught me that I absolutely need meetings, regular meetings, lots of meetings. I still need them. I always will. I'm an alcoholic in recovery and I want to stay there.

 What I now find most interesting is when I was out there experimenting with how few meetings I might need, I had no memory of all those times I'd heard a person returning to AA after a relapse who said they drank after they "quit going to meetings."

                               "Cunning, Baffling, Powerful!!!" 

I need a home group to hold me accountable and I need to be there whenever it meets. I need additional meetings, too, because my blind-spot kind of head can so easily forget I have a chronic, terminal illness. 

We, of course, also need to follow all of AA's other suggestions for staying sober and for getting a high quality life in the process; like getting a sponsor, working the steps, doing service, sharing when asked, etc. 

Meetings need to be right there on that list, preferably near the top, because book, step and service work build the scaffolding beneath our ongoing recovery - but meetings are our medicine. 

The insights we get there, along with the laughter, are the cherries on top that makes the medicine taste better. 

All meetings are good for us. Even the ones we find a bit boring can teach us something about patience and tolerance (which most alcoholics have in short supply). 

And even when we feel like we didn't get much from any meeting, we have at least given others the benefit of our supportive presence there. 

We have no way of knowing how important that may have been for someone in that very moment. 

A great meeting, on the other hand, is one of the best experiences we can have in recovery. It offers us laughter, friendship, service, recovery ideas to put to work in our own lives, along with the gifts of giving and receiving love.

We'll leave a great meeting knowing others have learned something new from us about applying AA principles and we will have received constructive ideas to use for enhancing the quality of our own sobriety. 

Meetings can be the quick fix for minds that need what they need when they need it. I can't count the number of times I have arrived at a meeting stark raving mad and left afterwards stark raving sober, in other words restored to what passes for sanity in my head. 

I wrote the following in an earlier blog about meetings being our ongoing first aid for our alcoholism and I stand by it:

"... start watching the faces of your friends in recovery when they arrive at a meeting wearing stressed or angry faces. Watch as their expressions change over the length of the meeting, first smiles, then even laughter. By meetings-end everyone leaves relaxed and filled with renewed hope. Medicated! 

"I recently heard someone say, 'Sometimes my Higher Power needs to have skin on it.' Mine does, too. While I have many lovely moments of silent communion with the God of my understanding, I only actually hear God's direct messages when they are spoken by other AA members in meetings."

Many of us have returned to in-place meetings, but many of us have not. Some of us who now have friends in AA all over the world are doing both. The time of Covid gave us the gift of Zoom meetings and what a boon they have been and still are to us all. 

One click opens meetings to us on a global scale! 

If you don't find that exciting I wonder what it might take to excite you? 

Besides - surprise, surprise - online meetings are not new. 

(Neither, BTW, are women only meetings which have been around since the 1950s). 

Here's what our Big Book has to say about going online. If it sounds familiar, good for you for reading the Big Book, because it's right there following the Foreword in the Fourth Edition:

Taking advantage of technological advances, for example, A.A. members with computers can participate in meetings online, sharing with fellow alcoholics across the country or around the world. Fundamentally, though, the difference between an electronic meeting and the home group around the corner is only one 

of format. 

In any meeting, anywhere, A.A.'s share experience, strength, and hope with each other, in order to stay sober and help other alcoholics. Modem-to-modem or face-to-face, A.A.'s speak the language of the heart in all its power and simplicity.

During my own time in A.A. I've noticed the truth in that old A.A. adage, "Meeting Makers Make It." People I see week after week and month after month, I also tend to see in meetings year after year. 

But recently I've heard a new phrase - "I'm taking a break from A.A." - a sentence said over the shoulder by those who walk away from meetings. I wonder if they think their alcoholism will take a break, too? 

Spoiler alert - it won't.

The lucky ones will return to meetings, more battered by their disease and - hopefully - more teachable. Some won't make it back. Their obituaries will read they died from "a short illness" ...  "in a car wreck" ... "from natural causes" ... and so on. 

Alcoholism is seldom, if ever, mentioned in obituaries (along with deaths by drunken domestic violence), but all the same it's often the underlying cause of those kinds of untimely deaths.

Meeting Makers, in addition to racking up long-term sobriety, also tend to be people who eventually accomplish goals in other areas of their lives. They become motivated to do better things, like going back to finish school or adding some more degrees. 

Sometimes they write books, or organize workshops, or charities, take up skiing, parachute out of airplanes - or even learn to fly them.

Filled with sober new self-confidence, AA members regularly have mid-life career changes, often embracing work in medicine, especially in addictions recovery, social work, or to fill some other need in the mental health field. 

Many enter their first ever long-term satisfying romantic relationships, get married, have children, or build a healthy loving relationship with partners who stuck with them through their years in addiction.

 We'll hear about such accomplishments and think, "If they can do that, I can do that," and then we do. 

We are able to accomplish our new goals because we have established a pattern of action by staying sober. We learn to apply the same tools of recovery in building better lives for ourselves. 

When we go to meetings and work the program we change our outlook, our goals and our accomplishments. As a good friend of mine with long term sobriety said recently, "If I go to meetings for 30-plus years and don't change for the better, I'd be a shit student." 

 I'm going to leave you now with that thought. After writing all the above - and losing 2/3 of the copy forever from "the cloud" (a black cloud!) at one point ... 

                      I need a meeting.