After our meeting today, I was too busy to stop and think about the meeting itself and what I said. The reason I say this is not to boost my image, but to respond to the meeting itself and some startled members, who came up to me after wards and spoke to me. I didn’t have time to stop and think about it.
There was a lot of laughing and kidding around in the meeting. But there was a man sitting there, who had announced that he was coming back after twelve years of drinking. And there was a lot of activity going on. Spilled coffee and people going back and forth and mopping it up. Then there were all those people getting up and going out and getting more coffee. Looked like an anthill. And then two or three women sitting in front of this man carrying on a conversation. I was sitting in the back observing all of this and I could see the man looking from one side to the other as all of this went on. I couldn’t tell if he was distracted because he didn’t want to hear what was being said, or that it was hard to focus with the chaos of the meeting itself.
Made me think back to those days, when I came in. The secretaries of the groups I attended always made an announcement to the members to get their coffee now before the meeting started. And then no one got up and went and got coffee. There was more order in the room. You could listen and hear what was being said. And no conversations on the side. If that happened, one of the old timers would tell, whoever it was, to take their conversation outside. I guess that was that way, because the people in the room wanted to get sober and stay sober.
I got called on near the end of the meeting. I told the man that it wasn’t necessary for any of us to go out drinking again. I told him that I came in and had x number of years and I hadn’t found it necessary to take a drink since I came through these doors. The second thing I told him was that there was nothing funny about alcohol. If we’re alcoholics, we have a disease, which will kill us, if we drink again. The final thing was that if he wanted to get sober we were there for him. If not there was a bar next door.
I’m not sure which of the things I said brought a response from some. I guess I wasn’t really listening, because, like I said, I was in a hurry.
Anyway, I was thinking about this now. Nothing funny about alcohol for the alcoholic. For someone like me it’s deadly. That’s all I needed to know when I came in. I already needed to get sober, but, like the First Step in the 12&12 said, it’s in here that we learn the fatal nature of this disease. And it also says that knowing this we become willing to listen as only the dying can. That it should be enough to convince us to do anything to get sober.
It did me.