Bill W. had a number of words he used in the writing of the BB, which kept blocking me and holding me up from going any further in this program. In fact, I can remember how angry they made me. I didn’t know that I was angry until much later on. One word was “abandon”. “Abandon yourself to God.” I couldn’t do that. I had never abandoned myself to anything. Or had I? Later on I was to realize that yes I had. I had abandoned myself to alcohol. I had let go and let alcohol. Why couldn’t”t I see that?
But still, I stumbled over that word. After all, the solution to this drinking problem I had was going to be found in my belief in a Higher Power. And yet, I felt constrained to hold back. That concept was foreign to all I knew growing up. Abandon meant something unreasonable to me and I wasn’t going to give up my power to reason things out. So I told myself.
I mean, did Bill think someone like me was capable of just letting go of everything? That was just too much to ask for. By now, you probably can see that I had always thought in terms of black and white. I was always too literal in my interpretation of things. The very fact that those words he wrote were at the end of the BB never occured to me. I thought that I had to do whatever was asked of me right this very minute. The fact that I wasn’t capable of that early on in this program never occured to me. That this was a process and not an event never came to mind.
When Bill said that rebellion dogged our every step, that I could agree with. Internally I was fighting everyone and everything. I had to analyze almost all of what he wrote or what was being said around the tables and coming from my sponsor. I had always been this way and now was more so. I remember taking a course at GE, when I was working for them. The engineer, who was giving the course, was explaining. as simply as he could, the source of electricity. When he said that the main source was from generators, I had to raise my hand and ask him where it came from before that. His answer was too simple for me. He said it was just there. That never satisfied me as it did the others. They just accepted it as a fact.
Not me. No siree.
Surrender and acceptance was not for me. Never had been. I wanted to argue and I did for a long time. How did I ever stay sober? Yet I have. Because of the process. Slowly but surely I accepted what this program has offered to me. How? It’s a mystery to me in a way. All I know is that I eventually began to practice something one of the psychiatrists, who helped AA early on, had called the “discipline of surrender”. I lacked discipline when I came here.
I now know that my sponsor knew that. I now know that all those old timers, who were there before me, knew that. They too had suffered from a lack of self discipline and they too had to learn that.
I think I know part of the secret, which had eluded me. It’s in the twelfth step. It didn’t say we succeeded, it simply said we tried.
Anyway, I was thinking about this this morning. I thinking about staying sober.