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I traveled this week, and I have come to love hitting meetings in other areas.
I didn’t used to. In early sobriety, when I traveled, I thought, “I’ll just plug back in when I get back home. It’s only five days.” The problem is, by Day 3 or 4, I was usually starting to slide a bit. And on trips where I was by myself, eating crappy gas station snacks in lonely hotel rooms for long stretches, I really got squirrelly in a hurry.
So when I got to go to Wisconsin this past week on a work trip for four days, I knew I’d have a better stay if I got to a meeting. And so I did exactly that, and it was awesome!
I must still think I’m pretty special, though, because every single time I poke around the inter webs for recovery meetings in a new place, I always catch myself thinking, “Holy crap, they have a bunch of meetings out here, too?! Apparently, there are alcoholics and addicts in places other than the town I live in. Who knew?!”
But I find those meetings to be life savers. Over the years, I’ve been to the southernmost meeting in the U.S., when I was in Key West (first and only meeting where chickens were walking around!). I went to a meeting in western Pennsylvania once where they took a group conscience at the beginning to allow smoking at the meeting—I voted no but everybody else said yes, so I got a nice dose of recovery along with roughly 20 secondhand cigarettes. And I loved it!
I really enjoy the different brands and thought processes around recovery that you run into. It’s a little like trying out restaurants when you’re in a different place, or listening to different language dialects when you hear people share at meetings. I love all of it.
The meeting I went to in Wisconsin had about 20 people in an actual recovery club, which had a few meetings every day. They did all the normal preamble stuff at the beginning, except they had a spot in the meeting where people could get up and just say good news or bad news. One guy talked about a great book he was reading. Somebody else announced that a member’s wife had died and to maybe say a prayer or two for the family.
Then we did something I’d never seen at a meeting. We counted off by threes and then split into three smaller meetings, and we re-formed a few minutes later in each corner of the room. I asked about that, and somebody said they found it’s a good way to let newcomers work their way into recovery in smaller, less intimidating spaces.
On my way out, I noticed a big whiteboard in the front of the room. It had around five different statistics about the devastation of addiction. It showed how many people die every day, week and year from alcohol and drugs. At the bottom, I saw a bunch of pictures of people who’d died over the years of the disease. I wasn’t sure how I felt about putting up pictures of people we lost to the disease but nobody asked me for that opinion so I kept that in my head.
I can say that it impacted me in a positive spiritual way because it reminded me, for the millionth time, that I am just lucky to be alive. It’s always beneficial to remember that I am an alcoholic and addict who could have died every single day for 3-5 years before I got sober… and I didn’t. What a gift.
So I went back to my hotel room last night with a full spiritual gas tank. I made some new friends that I can come back and see next time I am in Wisconsin, and it was a beautiful evening.
Did I still maybe eat some shitty food from a gas station? Uh… no comment.
ALCOHOLIC/ADDICT JOKE OF THE DAY
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.
One drunk says to another: “How many moons do you see tonight?”
And she replies, “In which row?”
(Credit: AA Grapevine, January 2002, Dave S. from Ithaca, New York)
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