No one can really deny the importance of bottoms. Just reading the stories in the BB, this is illustrated over and over again. In fact, the 1st Step in the 12&12 absolutely insists on how vital our bottoms are to all of us.
For myself, I know just how much I value my own bottom. I keep it fresh in my mind. I never want to forget it. I never want to go back there again. Just the possibility renews my resolve to never forget. It’s what got me into this program and began my sober life.
But, from my own experience, I believe there are other bottoms, right here in the program. Other moments of pain, which have awakened me to get off my duff and move on. There’s more to do. I was listening to a speaker today, who reminded me of this. A very spiritual man, who was not necessarily talking about AA, but how we grow along spiritual lines.
As he spoke, I was made to look back at my own life in this program. He pointed out how, when we first come into a program like AA, we begin to realize that the program saved us. In my case from alcohol and certain inevitable death from our compulsion to drink. That made me so grateful, that I was willing to do anything it took to grab on to what this program offered me. But after a while, maybe two or three years, that gratitude and the freshness of being helped began to dim. Complacency set in. Meetings began to seem stale. They sounded like the same old same old. I almost reached the stage of “why bother”.
The speaker said that we often forget that the beginning is not a healing. It’s just a beginning.
But I had reached another beginning. I was at the beginning of losing spirituality, which had begun to blossom in my life. I was, I think, beginning an emotional binge. It was about then that I began to experience another bottom. I was in real pain and found myself, almost instinctively, on my knees again. I needed help and I found I needed to continue to work this program in my life.
I began to understand why some alcoholics go back out and drink again. I had stopped the process of change, which I had began, back when I came into this program. I had forgotten the words in the BB, or better yet, I really didn’t understand them. The spiritual life is not a theory: We have to live it.
It’s change which I have always had trouble with. Fear of what I might change into. But change is what the spiritual program is all about. Everytime I have refused, I’ve hit a brick wall. Another bottom. But, if I really mean that I don’t want to drink again, if I want to stay sober by the daily reprieve we have, I’m going to have to act on maintaining my spiritual condition. And, I’ve been told I can’t stay sober on what I did yesterday. I have to keep moving forward.
Just a quick inventory of my character defects indicates to me that there is definitely more work to be done. I hate the pain that a new bottom brings into my life, but I have to say it is a signpost pointing down the road, which says, “keep moving”. I want to stay sober, so I think I will keep moving and changing; to live this spiritual life.