None of us, I believe, would be so crazy as to step out onto a highway in the path of a column of rushing cars. Yet, every year, we will hear of something like that. Someone trying to take a shortcut and thinking they could make it to the other side safely. Or, maybe not. Maybe it was deliberate.
I was thinking of that today, because something like that almost happened to me. In a moment of sheer madness I almost did that myself. I was crazy. I was going to step out into the path of the onrushing buses that flew past the bar I had been sitting in. But, as I stepped off the bar stool, the bartender reached over and grabbed my wrist and asked me if he could help. And that was the start of my journey into sobriety and beyond.
Why am I bringing this up today? It was a long time ago. For one thing, I never want to forget those last moments of drinking and what alcohol had done to me. The second reason was that I was thinking of what I was offered on that day, which calmed my fevered mind down and gave me a second chance at life.
I was reading the last few words in the Fifth Tradition and was reminded of what the message is that we’re supposed to carry to the new man suffering from alcoholism, just as I did so many years ago. I wasn’t offered wealth. I wasn’t being offered fame or fortune. Not sex nor religion. I was being offered something, which up to that point I had never been able to achieve.
It was “simply” sobriety. Or, better yet, a solution, an answer to why I couldn’t stop drinking.
I don’t know if I often stop to think about this. What was it that made me grab onto this message? I had tried to stop drinking many times before, but nothing had worked. Yet this time a few simple words turned my whole life around. A man asked me if I wanted to get sober and then told me that there was a place where men and women met and stayed sober together. It was that simple. I said yes and I believed him. The rest is history.
Desperation, despair, and death. That’s where I was at the moment I heard those words. It’s called a bottom. My bottom. Bill W. talks about this and tells us that it’s the one necessity to get us sober and keep us that way. Every time I read his words in the First Step of the 12&12, I know the truth of that. Like the words in The Doctor’s Opinion said, frothy emotional appeal rarely works. But the three “D’s” above do. We, who carry the message just open the door with a message of hope.
Anyway, I was sitting here thinking and being grateful to my Higher Power, the program which was so generously offered to me, and the people who continue to carry the message to me and others.