As we approach New Year’s Eve, I always have to go back in my mind, to the beginning. It will be 35 years this Jan., when I walked through the doors of this program. That’s not bragging. It’s just what is. All this, in spite of myself. If it weren’t for the miracle of this program, I would have been long gone. Yet, somehow I’m still here.
It’s been what others told me I must do. One day at a time. That’s what I have tried to do, since the start. And, I didn’t do that very well. I surely suffered from projection and morbidly wandering around in the past for a long long time. Like Bill W. pointed out, I was subject to fears of a thousand kinds. He told us that the fabric of our life was shot through with these kinds of fears. I was plagued so often with doubts and worry. I remember a kindly old doctor, who was treating me for all kinds of stomach trouble, telling me he was the same way I was. He said he worried all the time and he asked me to look how his life turned out, in spite of all that worry. He was very successful.
When I think back to that moment, when this doctor spoke of his own problems, I can apply the same thing to mine. But he didn’t have the program we have. He wasn’t an alcoholic. How he solved his own problems with life, I don’t know. But I do know that we have been given the tools to deal with ours. It was the steps, which changed me. They taught me how to keep it simple. They have taught me how to stop complicating the uncomplicated. In the process they have brought about a change in me, which I could never have forecasted. I don’t know how that all happened, but it did.
All I have to do, I learned, was to never forget what brought me here. Remembering that last day drinking has always been the driving point in my life. I never want to forget that and to keep it ever fresh in my mind. I remember my first meeting and what one man did there. He read from the Jan. 6 page of the Twenty Four Hour book. The sense of those words has always stuck with me. That the most important decision my life was my decision to stop drinking. Could I ever afford to forget it? I was to repeat that message for many years in my mind. It was all this fevered mind could hold onto. How grateful I am to that man. I still remember his name and how he looked. I think of him often. He became a good friend and he was that to the end of his days, when he died sober. What a great example for me.
These memories are ones of gratitude for a new life I never thought was possible, when I was in the gutter of my life. To be redeemed from the trash heap of life was unthinkable. Yet, as I look way back, it has come true. I am sober and I can’t help but say thank you to each and everyone, who have been tolerant and loving enough to support me through the sickness I suffered from. I thank God and each of you for being there. I think of all of you, though near or far.
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