Sitting next to a young man, who has come back and has a couple of weeks in, I was listening to him, talking to a young woman, who was coming back again. I listened carefully to what he had to say.
He told how he had a few years in and had begun to think how safe he was. So safe, he said, that he thought he could cut back on meetings. Soon he wasn’t going to meetings and he said that he even stopped praying. It wasn’t long before he was dinking again. Now there’s a formula.
The other thing he said was that, when he was drinking he always felt unlucky. All he had was a streak of bad luck. Everything was going bad to worse for him. Always. Since he’s been back, he has realized that there’s no such thing as “luck”. Between booze and himself, he had created his own bad luck.
He said that it wasn’t luck that we were sober. If we think we’re lucky being sober, it’s because we did something, like working the steps. He said that’s what he was trying to do at this time. Work the steps. He doesn’t want to drink again and he’s seen the result in his father’s life and the people who are sober in here.
I thoujght, as he talked, about somethng my sponsor Tom told me one time, when I said how lucky we all were. He, too, said that it wasn’t luck that got us sober, but that we were fortunate to have had the oopportunity to be in this progtram. We were fortunate to have been presented a spiritual set of tools, which works for us. So, it isn’t luck, but good fortune.
I was thinking about how fortunate we all are to be sober. Makes me grateful to have had the opportunity to come here and to be reminded of that.