Dull, drab, boring. The same things being said over and over again. The same people, the same old tiring stuff. At times, everything can get to be that way, it seems. Same job, same marriage, same relationships, same town, same old AA. This was something our founders and old timers found out for themselves. But they had a solution for it.
Before I came into this program and sometime after, I was always looking for something to fill that empty place within me. Like so many of us, I tried filling it up from the outside. I was to learn in here that nothing out there can do that. Inside, I was like a bottomless pit.
What I found was that this program is an inside job. I had to fill up from the inside out rather than the outside in. This is the intention of the spiritual way of life. I had to fill that hole inside of me with the God of my understanding. And when I had enough, I could carry that out into my life outside of me. This is what was meant by we can’t give what we haven’t got. We have to go get it. Where do we get it? Through the practice of all of these twelve steps.
Right there is where many of us balked. Just like the BB said. I never realized what a rich, rewarding life was ahead of me through the practice of these steps. I, like I always did, assumed that these were just a dried up bunch of things, that I felt were more in line with those, who were old and had nothing better to do with their lives. As long as I wasn’t drinking, I felt I could figure the rest of it out for myself.
There was another thing that was holding me back. Fear. I was afraid to let anyone know anything about me, including God. I was still holding tight to my old thinking and ways of doing things. I was hoping that somehow things would work out the way I wanted them to. What was that? Who knows? But the need to stay sober finally won out and I began to do something, beginning with the fourth step. The fourth chapter was right.
The fourth chapter begins with the choices we are presented with: either choose to live a spiritual way of life or choose a way that will lead back to drinking and madness and death. Hmmm. Like Sandy B. said, door number 1 or door number 2.
The fourth and fifth steps got me over the hump. I began to pray in earnest and slowly started to put the third step into practice.
Now, back to the beginning of this letter. What is it that turned that kind of thinking around for our founders and old timers. It was the practice of the twelfth step. Working with others. Bill wrote about this very thing in his article on Love. He was in a rut. He was depressed and nothing he tried could get him out of it. That is until he realized that he wasn’t giving away what had been so freely given to him. He went and started working with other people again and the dark hole he was in fell away.
That’s what I find works for me. Anyway, that was what I was thinking this morning. Just do it.