Inevitably someone will bring up the subject about the importance of meetings. The person who brought that up yesterday had one year. Most of us know why. Because, having achieved a year, the person begins to believe that they have it made. They’ve proved to themselves that they have drinking under control and no longer need to come to meetings. They’ve heard it all, know it all, and now are able to handle their sobriety themselves. What need do they have of hanging around other alcoholics?
For myself, it is pretty clear why I have to go to meetings. The first is that I don’t have a program. I learned a long time ago and have seen it demonstrated over and over again that by ourselves there is no program. WE have a program. We share this program with each other. When I choose to separate myself from the rest of the program, I’m on my own.
I remember learning a long time ago that I can’t stay sober by myself. I need others like myself to help me to stay sober by reminding me of what it is that works. It is by being with and talking and sharing with others that I begin to become willing to come open and honest. It is only by being in the company of other alcoholics that I am reminded that there is a solution. A solution to my problem with alcohol and the unmanageable life I brought into this program with me.
There is an old saying in this program, that those who don’t go to meetings never get to hear what happens to those who don’t go to meetings. How true that is. Over many years of regularly attending meetings, I have seen the results of what happens to others, who dropped out of going to meetings. Not a pretty picture. But it has done something for me. It has encouraged me not to stop.
But there is something else, which has kept me going to meetings. AA is the best thing that happened to me in my life. I not only can’t afford to forget that, but it has given me a gift I never counted on. I love AA and I love going to meetings.
None of that happened over night. There were a lot of obstacles within me, which threatened to sabotage this program for me. The main one was me. My ego, my thinking I was smarter and more intelligent than all these other alcoholics, that I knew it all, and a host of character defects running wild. I needed others to help me get all these obstacles out of the way, or at least under some control.
The first was dishonesty and a closed mind. Thank my higher power for a good and experienced sponsor with long sobriety, who helped me. He and those old timers I met were perfectly willing to let me humiliate myself, so that I could learn one of the most important virtues I would need to stay sober; humility. I am so grateful that they let me and helped me to do that. I owe them my life.
I could never have gotten the opportunities I did, if I had failed to go to meetings.
There is another old saying, which I know is true from time and experience: Meeting makers make it.