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Of all the things I have heard in sobriety that stick with me, the one I have been thinking about the most lately is that sobriety isn’t for people who want it, and it’s not for people who need it—it’s for people who DO it.
I have found that to be so true, in sobriety and in life. You can think about something. You can talk about something. You can plan something. But what did you do?
One of the biggest things I hear at meetings sometimes is the same person saying the same thing over and over again.
“I need to get back into stepwork.”
“I need to be getting to more meetings.”
“I need to pick up the phone.”
That’s fine. I’ve said all those things. But I also developed a radar for when I’ve said it at meetings for three months in a row… that’s a very bad sign. It means I have awareness of an issue but no real desire to change it. Saying something out loud is usually helpful, but it’s not magic beans that make the solution sprout up out of the ground. You have to actually do the thing.
I think about that saying often when it comes to goals. I often cite a story from a sober friend of mine, when he mentioned to his sponsor that his self-esteem wasn’t great. His sponsor said, “Go do esteemable things.”
That’s the key to changing a behavior, in my opinion. If I want to be healthy, I have to do healthy things and not do unhealthy things. If you eat donuts for breakfast, a tiny salad for lunch and Taco Bell on the way home, guess what, you didn’t do enough healthy things. If you then spend the night wishing you had done more healthy things, and planning on how to do more healthy things tomorrow, and lamenting that you blew it that day… well, that’s not valuable action, either.
Same goes with sobriety. How many of us spent weeks, months, even years thinking hard about sobriety? But we didn’t do it. We didn’t go to rehab. Or meetings. Or get a sponsor. It was all wishes and worries and a bunch of other non-action.
This concept hit me this week because I have been slowing down a bit with my newsletter. I have a lot going on right now, so I did need to take a step back. But as I was thinking about writing this entry for the past few days, I thought, Geez, stop wanting or needing to do an LOL Sober about that topic. Do it! So here it is!
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:
"I was a member of Alcoholics Oblivious."
(Credit: Grapevine, Jo B. of Anchorage, Alaska, January 2009)
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