I sometimes wonder what I do know. Do I know? My sponsor helped me with that many years ago, when he told me that I didn’t know that I didn’t know. I only thought I did.
Know what? To start off with, how to live. Next, how to live a sober life. Next, how to live a spiritual life. Is that all? I would say it was about everything. I really never knew any of this before. All I knew was how to drink alcohol and follow it to wherever it took me.
It wasn’t that I wasn’t well educated, but what did that have to do with what I needed to do? All that did was get in my way. And my sponsor helped me to get it out of my way. He did that by telling me I was educated beyond my intelligence. Way beyond.
One example was how I kept avoiding the 4th Chapter in the BB, We Agnostics. I kept passing by that chapter, because I had studied theology and knew all about agnostics. How crazy was that? When he finally did get me to look at it, I saw for the first time what I needed to know in order to begin this way of life. Either live a spiritual life or die and alcoholic death. That did it for me. I already had almost died as a result of drinking and I didn’t want to go there again. Chapter 4 was the beginning of opening my mind and my heart to what this program contained.
Why was I thinking about this today? I was witnessing a person, who was willing to gamble with his life today. About a month sober and going off to spend some days with his drinking friends. I’m just guessing that he thought he knew what he was doing.
That’s the way I was, when I first came in. I thought I knew better than anyone in here. I didn’t have a clue. Thankfully I didn’t drink. I’m grateful for the way those old timers treated me back then. They thought nothing of telling someone like me to shut up and listen. That I knew how to drink but I didn’t know how to stay sober. If I would take the cotton out of my ears and stick it in my mouth and listen, I might just learn something. And that was just the beginning.
Someone wrote and told me that I might know what I’m talking about. I had to step back, when I got that. That’s because sometimes I think I do. However, when I stop and think about how I got here and what I have learned and how I have been able to stay sober, I have to pause and think. True, I have read and studied the AA literature. I have done the 12 Steps. I have had that spiritual awakening. I have been restored to sanity as described in the BB.
And there it is. It’s not me, who is keeping me sober. It’s the sober members, whom I have been associated with over the years in here…and my Higher Power. The spiritual way of life that I was offered is what keeps me here. And that’s it right there. Spirituality. I can say it. I can tell anyone, who wants to listen that this was the answer for me…for all of us. But beyond that? I need to repeat what my sponsor told me. I don’t know that I don’t know. I only think I do.