I came home this afternoon and found that I could not get on the internet. There was some kind of glitch in Windows. I called the service desk at Road Runner and they walked me through the process to restore the process, which had failed. It worked and I’m grateful. But the thing I had to do was go back a few days previous to this date today and start there. It reminded me of a lot of things; mainly to go back and restart the program.
I couldn’t help but think about the noon meeting today. The subject was the fatal nature of this disease. One of the men recounted how a friend and neighbor of his had died yesterday from his drinking. He felt bad about his friend, but was grateful that he had found the program, which had saved his life. His was expressing his dismay that he had not been able to help his friend into the program, which might have saved his life.
There was a lot of recounting of a lot of losses over the years and the gratitude of all that they had been able to be rescued by the gift of this program. A lot of people said that it took them time to realize that they actually cared about their lives. What a terrible disease. We don’t even have the ability to care about whether we live or die. We’re in such despair.
I remember reading the first step in the 12&12 where it says that we come here to learn the fatal nature of this disease. I know that I didn’t know that until I got here. Like so many others I had reached a point where I didn’t want to go on living. And yet I didn”t know that this was the fatal nature. I had to come here and hear this for the first time. What a wake up call.
Another aspect of today’s meeting was how many people go back out, after they’ve been here for a while, and die. There was a woman, sitting two seats away, who said that she was just coming back from ten years out there. She said she had five years before going back out. She said that she really believed she had worked this program but she had gone back out anyway.
What is it in people like us that we can experience failure of this sort? Two other people sitting next to me had just returned from two weeks in Japan. They said that experience had shaken them to the core. Alcoholism was all around them. The trains and subways were filled with the aroma of alcohol and men were passed out all over the place. Yet, they couldn’t find a meeting anyplace over there. They said they were almost crazy by the time they got to this place for a meeting today. I knew both of them well and you could hear it in their voices and see it in their eyes. But, they hadn’t taken a drink and help was at hand.
How often we all get caught up in the trivia of our lives and forget what it is we are doing here. We so often get off subject and forget all of the reality of what it is that we’re infected with. Alcohol. I even heard one man talking today, who wanted to talk about smoking! He went on and on with it. He had forgotten, even in the face of the subject, what was really wrong with him.
The proper subject of an AA meeting is alcohol. It’s about drinking and not drinking. It’s about the solution we all found here. Why would we want to talk about anything else? It’s the failure to remember this that I thinks helps us to get off track. For me, anyway, I need to reminded on a daily basis of what is wrong with me so that I can remember what is right with me…sobriety and how this program works.