An old friend of mine is celebrating her 35th this month and it prompted me to write and recognize this milestone in her sobriety. It came to mind in my message to her that, regardless of the significance of the day, that it’s just another day in which we all hope to stay sober.
For some reason, as I wrote, my mind went back to one of my favorite lines in the BB. “Everything had changed and yet nothing was changed.” That line, which comes from the story The Man Who Overcame Fear, describes so much of what goes on in the course of my life in these years of sobriety.
It describes an event in this man’s life, where he stops questioning God’s existence, and falls to his knees and surrenders. He goes to sleep and, when he awakes, he writes down his impression of that moment: Everything had changed and yet nothing was changed.
How often have I witnessed that. Every time I undergo a change in attitude, when things seem to be going downhill, I find the circumstances are still the same, but I am in a better place. Every time I stop my day and start over, when faced with “impossible odds”, nothing is different, but I am. Every time I feel provoked to act out, and I catch myself and change my mind, the source of provocation is still the same, but something has happened to me. I am different.
There’s no flash of light. No “movement” of the earth or any sense of a Divine intervention. Nevertheless, like that man, I eventually become aware that what has occurred is nothing less than a spiritual awakening. This, I would guess, is what Fred talked about in More About Alcoholism, when he said that he realized that spiritual principles would solve all his problems. Mine have been often solved without my knowledge, just like the man said: everything had changed and yet nothing had changed. But he had and so have I.
Just thinking on a warm Summer’s afternoon.