I don’t know about you, but when I came in and for a while after, I wanted twenty years in twenty minutes. I’ve heard others say the same thing. It took a long time for that yearning to go away. I wanted to be like those old timers, who were so full of wisdom and knowledge of this program that others hung on their every word. Or so I thought. I certainly was not hanging onto their words, but I thought others did.
My sponsor always seemed to know where I was at. He seemed to be able to perceive my anxiety to look for shortcuts and to get on with growth. He told me one day that if I were to cut corners I would get cut on the edges. And he kept reminding me that it was always one day at a time. That I would get to where I wanted to go only by doing what everyone else did.
I know now, looking back, that all I was seeking was an inflated ego. I couldn’t get enough of that. But he also told me something else; that it wasn’t the length of sobriety which counted, but the quality of that sobriety in each one of us. But first I was going to have to learn some humility. I was soon going to get an example of that.
One night I got a twelfth step call. It was for a woman, so I got hold of a woman to go with me. The lady we went tlo see was in terrible shape and she had to be hospitalized in a psychiatric ward. After that hospitalization, a good friend of mine began to pick her up and bring her to meetings on a regular basis. The woman seemed to be helpless and hopeless in every way. She didn’t drink, but that seemed all she waa capable of doing. She would say her name and then the rest was all this mumbling and grumbling.
An unattractive woman, others seemed to avoid her. Not my friend. She stuck with her, even though she had misgivings and was tempted to drop her at times. A few months passed and one night when she was called on all of this marvelous stuff started to come out of her. I can remember how stunned we all were. After that she seemed to progress in an unbelievable way. And then she was suddenly hospitalized and was dead in a relatively short time from cancer. My friend stuck with her until the end. It was something to behold and remember.
Later on my sponsor and his wife were talking about her and how she came so far in such a short period of time. It was so amazing and hard to comprehend. She had a quality to her sobriety which you could see and hear, but it was all done in what seemed to be a blink of an eye. How could this be? And the humility in her was so clear. What happened to bring this about?
Both my sponsor and his wife, who had grown close to her in that short period of time, said that they had to believe that this woman must have known on an intuitive level that she was only going to have a short time to live and that she had to get what she got in a very narrow window of that time. She had no idea that she was going to die until almost the end. Yet there it was for all of us to see.
I have never forgotten those moments in my life. I don’t think anyone of us, who knew her in that short period she was with us can. Or at least we shouldn’t. And here I am, so many years later, and I still don’t think I can hold a candle to what she accomplished. She was proof that it isn’t quantity but quality which counts.
Somehow she got right to the essence of what this program is all about. That quality which can only come from applying these steps to our lives on a daily basis. The program had all of her attention. She lived her primary purpose to the max. In fact her name was Maxine.
I was sitting here and thinking about Maxine today and wondering about the quality of my program. I now have the quantity I was seeking, but what about the quality?