The one thing I have learned over time is that osmosis never works. Coming to meetings with the hope that all we have to do is be present and the program will rub off on us is the doorway to doom. Or, as my sponsor always said, the only thing that will rub off is rigor mortis.
I know from my own experience that, as long as I stalled and put off taking action on these Twelve Steps, all that happened was that I sank lower and lower down into myself. It was only, when I began to work these Steps in the order they were written that I began to change.
It took effort on my part. I couldn’t just sit there, laid back and idly listening to those members in the room. As time went on and I began to witness what happened to those in attendance, who went back out, I slowly began to realize that it was up to me to do my part, if I truly wanted to get sober and stay sober.
That was when my sponsor came over to me and told me that I was hanging around with the losers. I was only talking to those, who were like myself. I was fearful of going up to the old timers and talking to them. I was afraid that they would take over and run my life, I guess. Or maybe it was just that my pride wouldn’t let anyone tell me anything. I was totally unaware that what I knew was of no earthly good, when it came to how to live a “normal” life, or for that matter a spiritual way of life.
Only by applying these Steps to my life did I come to realize this. My sponsor keyed me into this, when he told me that what was in my brain wouldn’t get me sober. Not all the knowledge I had acquired over the years was of any value. None of it had gotten me sober. Only pain and insanity did that for me.
I found that I had to learn the lessons every sober alcoholic learned before me. I had to learn how to surrender and accept. Even when I didn’t like it. I had to learn to put my ego aside and listen to those, who knew how to stay sober. Wow! That was deflating to say the least. Humiliating to begin with for a fact.
But it was this kind of deflation of my ego and the accompanying humiliations that I began to learn for the first time how to live a sober life. Like Bill W. said in the 12&12 in the Seventh Step, that sometimes the only way we begin to learn what humility is all about is through humiliation. After a while I began to see the value in those moments, which stopped me in my tracks and got me on the beam. I now remember those moments and cherish them. They were the beginning of my spiritual awakening.
I was thinking about the awful fact of those who dream about achieving sobriety by sitting on their derrieres. I learned it wouldn’t work for me. Plus the fact that I get to observe how it never does for others either.