DAILY PONDERABLES
Together WE Trudge The Road OF Happy Destiny
Daily Reflections
FREEDOM FROM "KING ALCOHOL"
...let us not suppose even for an instant that we are not under constraint.... Our former tyrant, King Alcohol, always stands ready again to clutch us to him. Therefore, freedom from alcohol is the great "must" that has to be achieved, else we go mad or die.
AS BILL SEES IT, p. 134
When drinking, I lived in spiritual, emotional, and sometimes, physical confinement. I had constructed my prison with bars of self-will and self-indulgence, from which I could not escape. Occasional dry spells that seemed to promise freedom would turn out to be little more than hopes of a reprieve. True escape required a willingness to follow whatever right actions were needed to turn the lock. With that willingness and action, both the lock and the bars themselves opened for me. Continued willingness and action keep me free--in a kind of extended daily probation--that need never end.
From the book Daily Reflections
© Copyright 1990 by Alcoholics Anonymous World Services, Inc.
Twenty-Four Hours A Day
A.A. Thought for the Day
Third, alcoholics recover their proper relationship with other people. They think less about themselves and more about others. They try to help other alcoholics. They make new friends so that they're no longer lonely. They try to live a life of service in stead of selfishness. All their relationships with other people are improved. They solve their personality problems by recovering their personal integrity, their faith in a Higher Power, and their way of fellowship and service to others. Is my drink problem solved as long as my personality problem is solved?
Meditation for the Day
All that depresses you, all that you fear, is really powerless to harm you. These things are but phantoms. So arise from earth's bonds, from depression, distrust, fear, and all that hinders your new life. Arise to beauty, joy, peace, and work inspired by love. Rise from death to life. You do not even need to fear death. All past sins are forgiven if you live and love and work with God. Let nothing hinder your new life. Seek to know more and more of that new way of living.
Prayer for the Day
I pray that I may let God live in me as I work for Him. I pray that I may go out into the sunlight and work with God.
From the book Twenty-Four Hours a Day
© Copyright 1975 by Hazelden Foundation
NA - Just for Today
Acting out
Page 103
"We learn to experience feelings and realize they can do us no harm unless we act on them."
IP No. 16, For the Newcomer
Many of us came to Narcotics Anonymous with something less than an overwhelming desire to stop using. Sure, the drugs were causing us problems, and we wanted to be rid of the problems, but we didn't want to stop getting high. Eventually, though, we saw that we couldn't have one without the other Even though we really wanted to get loaded, we didn't use; we weren't willing to pay the price anymore. The longer we stayed clean and worked the program, the more freedom we experienced. Sooner or later, the compulsion to use was lifted from us completely, and we stayed clean because we wanted to live clean.
The same principles apply to other negative impulses that may plague us. We may feel like doing something destructive, just because we want to. We've done it before, and sometimes we think we've gotten away with it, but sometimes we haven't. If we're not willing to pay the price for acting on such feelings, we don't have to act on them.
It may be hard, maybe even as hard as it was to stay clean in the beginning. But others have felt the same way and have found the freedom not to act on their negative impulses. By sharing about it and seeking the help of other recovering people and a Power greater than ourselves, we can find the direction, the support, and the strength we need to abstain from any destructive compulsion.
Just for Today: It's okay to feel my feelings. With the help of my sponsor, my NA friends, and my Higher Power, I am free not to act out my negative feelings.
From the book Just for Today
© Copyright 1991-2013 by Narcotics Anonymous World Services, Inc.
Thought for Today
When the power of love overcomes the love of power the world will know peace.
~Jimi Hendrix
I do not know You,God, because I am in the way. Please help me to push myself aside.
~ Flannery O'Conner
Buddha/Zen Thoughts
Whatever is not yours, abandon it. When you have abandoned it, that will lead to your welfare and happiness.
-Buddha, "Connected Discourses of the Buddha"
Native American
"Everything really is equal. The Creator doesn't look at me any better than He looks at the trees. We're all the same."
--Janice Sundown Hattet, SENECA
Sometimes humans think we are the center of the Universe. Sometimes we think we are above or better than other people or things. The Great Spirit made a set of Laws and Principles by which all things should live. Everybody and everything lives by the same Laws. We are all made of atoms just like the trees. The life force in the middle of the atom is the life force of the Great Mystery. It is the same for everything. We are all equal in the eyes of the Creator.
Great Spirit, today, I will respect your handiwork.
Keep It Simple
The best thing about the future is that it comes only one day a time.
Abraham Lincoln
Abraham Lincoln did great things for the United States. He took life One Day at a time.. He broke the future into manageable pieces. We can do the same. We can live in the present and focus on the task at hand.
Spirituality comes when we focus this way. When we stay in the present we find choice. And we worry less about the future. Still, we must have goals.
We must plan for the future.
Goals and plans help us give more credit to the present than to the future. And when we feel good about the present, we feel good about the future.
Prayer for the Day: Higher Power, help me focus. Help me keep my energy in the present. Have me live life One Day at a Time.
Action for the Day: When I find myself drifting into the future, I'll work at bring myself back to the present.
Big Book
Chapter 2 THERE IS A SOLUTION (pg 28 & 29)
Here was the terrible dilemma in which our friend found himself when he had the extraordinary experience, which as we have already told you, made him a free man.We, in our turn, sought the same escape with all the desperation of drowning men. What seemed at first a flimsy reed, has proved to be the loving and powerful hand of God. A new life has been given us or, if you prefer, "a design for living" that really works.
The distinguished American psychologist, William James, in his book "Varieties of Religious Experience," indicates a multitude of ways in which men have discovered God. We have no desire to convince anyone that there is only one way by which faith can be acquired. If what we have learned and felt and seen means anything at all, it means that all of us, whatever our race, creed, or color are the children of a living Creator with whom we may form a relationship upon simple and understandable terms as soon as we are willing and honest enough to try. Those having religious affiliations will find here nothing disturbing to their beliefs or ceremonies. There is no friction among us over such matters.
We think it no concern of ours what religious bodies our members identify themselves with as individuals. this should be an entirely personal affair which each one decides for himself in the light of past associations, or his present choice. Not all of join religious bodies, but most of us favor such memberships.
In the following chapter, there appears an explanation of alcoholism, as we understand it, then a chapter addressed to the agnostic. Many who once were in this class are now among our members. Surprisingly enough, we find such convictions no great obstacle to a spiritual experience.
Further on, clear-cut directions are given showing how we recovered. These are followed by three dozen personal experiences.
Each individual, in the personal stories, describes in his own language and from his own point of view the way he established his relationship with God. These give a fair cross section of our membership and a clear-cut idea of what has actually happened in their lives.
We hope no one will consider these self-revealing accounts in bad taste. Our hope is that many alcoholic men and women, desperately in need, will see these pages, and we believe that it is only by fully disclosing ourselves and our problems that they will be persuaded to say, "Yes, I am one of them too; I must have this thing."
********************
AA and the Religion Turnoff
AA Grapevine September 1977
Does our image of religiosity scare off too many suffering alcoholics?
A FRIEND OF MINE, a fellow alcoholic, died last month. He needn't have. He could have joined AA. The reason he didn't is the reason I nearly didn't, many years ago, and his death recalls the feelings I had then toward the program.
My friend, Tom, and I worked for the same newspaper. In our youth, we contributed heavily to the fortune of a greasy tavern owner in an alley behind the press room. Tom and I were lean and cocky in those years. The thought of a drinking problem for either of us would have been ridiculous. Tom went on to become a well-known correspondent and editor. After we left the paper, we kept in touch, and whenever our paths crossed, the encounter would occasion a glorious and usually prolonged drunk.
Eventually, though, we knew we had a problem. Not knowing how to "frame" it, see it in its true perspective, we called it booze, and let it go at that. We thought it went with the territory. Tom had remarried several times, his wives leaving him because of his drinking. I'd been in and out of several hospitals. Tom and I would lament the passing of the good old days and mark our observance by getting drunk.
Once, over a couple of prairie oysters to aid us through a horrendous hangover, I remember suggesting, half seriously, that we try AA.
"Not those Holy Rollers," he replied.
Several of our acquaintances had joined the program by then, but we saw little of them. On getting sober, they had a habit of avoiding the watering holes they'd helped make famous. Tom would bomb in from some far-flung war and call my place, and we'd hold a wake for those poor lost souls.
"Whatever happened to Ted?"
"Ah, the silly man got religion and joined AA."
"Is that a fact? The saints preserve us. Timothy, give us two more of the same. Drink up, me boyo. Our work's cut out for us."
As I recall, drinking was becoming work. An uphill fight all the way. All at once, it seemed, we had grown too old for chasing down Third Avenue in pursuit of rheumatic ghosts and the faltering legends of youth. Marathon drinking, to catch the blood-red sun over the East River, was no longer the lyrical experience it had been. Nor even running plays with a professional quarterback, or composing dirty limericks with a famous poet among the pillars of the El, some silver dawn.
But Tom and I had a grudging--perhaps the word is sneaking--respect for AA. Ironically, it was through Tom that I'd first become aware of the Fellowship. He'd written an article on alcoholism, mentioning the successful "cure" found by so many in AA.
Tom's and my attitude at that point could be summed up by saying we thought the program was okay for the people in it, but for ourselves we couldn't buy the God bit. The program, in our view, smacked of Christian fundamentalism, even evangelism. Then, too, while we were admitted drunks--defiantly so--we didn't admit to having the problem of definitive "alcoholics," as AA members labeled themselves.
For my last birthday, my wife gave me the latest--the fourth--edition of the Columbia Encyclopedia, hailed as the best one-volume encyclopedia in the language. I looked up AA, and there it was--Tom's mistake, repeated for the nth time. The program was described as a means for "curing" alcoholism. My old copy, the second edition, doesn't even have an entry for AA, and I'm not sure which is worse--misinformation or no information.
It seems to me that we editorial types share with other professionals what is so frequently a fatal misconception about the program. A misconception going beyond the careless reporting and editing that allow "cure" instead of "recovery." It goes to the heart of the matter, explaining why so many of us, like my late friend Tom, fail to make it into AA.
Our liverish, bloated egos feel insulted by what we don't even intellectually understand. We think the program is reserved for the poor, the ignorant, the uninformed. (G. K. Chesterton was fond of saying that intellectuals were seldom intelligent.) We think--even by the time we're driven to the desperate realization that something is the matter, something is killing us--that AA may be okay for the next guy, but we're too sophisticated for anything like that to work for us. We need something more complicated, more subtle, more suited to our peculiar genius, the exquisite refinements of our pain. Something, let us say, that sounds more medically or scientifically impressive.
And so, like Tom, we elect to die.
My recovery began with a fantastic awakening. I realized that it is possible to believe in a Higher Power, in the efficacy of prayer and meditation, in making a conscious contact with a Higher Power as those concepts, privately understood--or not understood--are suggested in AA, without the loss of one iota of my precious identity.
Instead of loss, the dread void of what to do in place of drinking, there is gain. A spiritual redeepening of the self, through the affirmation of AA principles that stem, not merely from Christianity, but from all the great faiths and philosophies. A sense of humility, the reapportioning of what is really important for the remainder of my life. Best of all, a new understanding of simplicity, of keeping things simple, of knowing truth, the truth that works for me. It could never have been found through the complicated search that always ended in despair when I drank.
I'd been looking for a reality that doesn't exist outside today!
Tom never knew this. He never really knew what time it was. Never, that is, knew that the time is always and forever Now.
I attended his funeral and looked on the stranger in the casket. Yet not entirely a stranger. Assuredly, it was not the Tom of old, with whom I'd run and drunk and sung. It could have been, incredibly, myself lying there, except for a grace and power beyond my telling here. He died for both of us (and all those that read this now).
As I left the funeral home on Madison Avenue, I was joined by another battered survivor, whom I hadn't seen in years. There was little left to see. He looked almost as bad as the one we'd come to mourn. We chatted on the corner. His watery eyes searched out a bar half a block up.
"C'mon, let's hoist a few."
I hesitated, not because I was tempted but because, after all this time in the program, that's still my reaction to friends and acquaintances who might also have a problem--and don't know how I've solved mine. One day at a time.
"I don't drink any more, Charlie. I'm in AA."
I saw the familiar start, the gleam of fright that crossed his face. We talked for a minute or two longer, then said goodbye. Charlie wanted to be rid of me, and how could I blame him, knowing so well what he was feeling? He didn't look back. Braving crowds and traffic with unswerving accuracy (he could have been crossing a minefield and it wouldn't have mattered), he disappeared under the neon sign of El Dorado, dreams, music, and that old black magic called oblivion. He left his life waiting in the street outside, like a dog tied to a lamppost.
I said a prayer for Charlie--for all of us, for Tom lately departed, for the living trapped in their denial and loneliness, in their embittered, cynical selves. I prayed that Charlie might get it. And suddenly the city blazed with a great beauty that throbbed and thrilled through me--that thing, that high I'd sought and never found in the bottom of a bottle. I felt the fierce, sweet joy of gratitude, standing there in the sunlit afternoon.
Maybe, I thought, maybe he'll come out before it's too late. God's will, chance, and change bear wondrous fruit. Just maybe what I said to him, the seed, will take hold and sprout. I recalled Tom's old tale of a miracle "cure" for what had ailed us both.
Now he was free of it. And dead.
I still had it, but was alive and well.
You never know.
J. W.
Manhattan, New York
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