What do I do, when I don’t know what to do? Last night I was watching a program and the man being interviewed told a story about the actor Sir Lawrence Olivier. It seemed he came up to another actor, who was once thin and now was grossly overweight. He asked the man what had happened to him. The man replied that he had a part in a play, which called for him to be overweight and he said he had to know how that felt. Olivier looked at him and shook his head and said, “Why not just act the part?”
Apparently the man didn’t know what to do, so without direction he felt that overstuffing himself would solve it. Olivier could see the simplest way out of his dilemma was to do what he was trained to do; act.
The man, who was being interviewed, was James Conlon, a symphony orchestra conductor. He was talking about people, who want to be concert pianists. He said that there were those, who could expertly play the piano and knew how to technically play the instrument. He, also, said there were those, who could feel the piece they were playing, but, who lacked the expertise to play the piece. People, who were more emotional. Then he said that somehow these two things had to be brought together. He said that the technical expert had to learn how to open himself up and just let go of worrying on how to do it “right”. He said it was okay to miss a few notes. Nobody is perfect and that’s all right.
I believe it’s a good analogy of this program. We come here to get sober. We’re directed to the steps and they take us to the place, where we find the solution to our drinking problem. Some of us worry and try to do these steps perfectly. We try to do all the things this program asks of us. But some of us fail to let go of seeking perfection and open up and let go and just surrender to the imperfection of this program. Our imperfections. The result may be that if we miss a few notes our whole program comes tumbling down.
We reach a point where every little thing starts to bother us. We start looking around for things or people, who we feel will help us fix what’s wrong. We want something that will make us feel better about ourselves. The problem is that we fail to see that is exactly what we did before we came here. One man at the meeting today said that he was addicted to things that would make him feel good. My thought was he was wrong. What he really needed to say was that he was addicted to things that made him feel bad. Because that’s the result.
Easy does it. Part of the directions. We have to let go of being too serious. Rule 62. The second step. Lack of power, which is our dilemma. Not only finding a Higher Power, but letting go and letting our HP empower us to live this life soberly. Taking a risk. A leap of faith, based on the hope we found here.
Just thinking.