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At a meeting the other night, we read A Vision for You, from the Big Book. (LINK) It’s not my favorite chapter, to be honest. But on this night, one part really stood out to me.
In that chapter, there are lengthy descriptions of what 12-step recovery looked like back then, and it was… just a couple of guys, trying to get sober. At one point, Bill W. and Dr. Bob meet with a potential third recovering drunk after a nurse says, “We have a real corker in the hospital right now. He just beat up some nurses.” So Bill and Bob go see him and try to get him started on a path to recovery.
First of all, I have conflicted feelings about what the nurse said. I love the word corker and am going to be incorporating that as much as possible into my normal life when I describe myself and other alcoholics. And I am also simultaneously horrified about the image of this drunk guy beating up nurses. Good lord.
But the biggest thing that stuck with me was the title: A Vision For You. The vision the Big Book has for me is so different than the vision these people had in the late 1930s. At my first meeting, there were chairs that someone had paid for, books that somebody ordered, church rent that someone had paid for, laminated charts with the 12 steps hanging on the walls, and people who’d been elected as trusted servants for that meeting. The original founders had no Big Book, no 12 steps and they were going to hospitals looking for people who might want to get sober.
That is a humbling thought. It’s reminder that there are millions of people who laid the groundwork for the incredible recovery options sitting right in front of my face. I don’t have to go to hospitals to look for a guy I might work the steps with. I have meetings right up the street. I don’t have to meet with churches to convince them they should let us use their basement. Somebody did that years and years ago. And I don’t have to figure out how to explain addiction and recovery to anybody on my own—I can hand them a book that does a remarkable job of that.
I don’t even need to come up with what to call myself. I am an alcoholic and an addict. But apparently I’m also a corker!
This newsletter is a place of joy and laughter about the deadly serious business of sobriety. So, as I will often do, let me close with a joke:
THE WIFE OF AN ALCOHOLIC was quoted as saying, "There are three ways to get something done: Do it yourself, hire someone to do it, or forbid my husband to do it."
(Credit: AA Grapevine, March 2005, by Richard M., Golden, Colorado)
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