Little note if taken of individual birthdays in Australia, although it has sometimes been an occasion for someone to bring a birthday cake to a meeting around here. Generally it is something that is OK to mention if asked to speak at a meeting. I still recall not being asked to speak at a meeting I'd driven some distance to get to when my ninth came around. Giving out chips seems reasonable, but I can't see much use in announcing coming birthdays at other meetings or making a meeting seem more like a testimonial dinner for a single member, something I ran across when I spent six weeks in Toronto in 2000 on my summer vacation. When I hit my first birthday, I thought it meant turning some sort of corner with everything getting better. As it happened, I hit a rough spot about three weeks later that got me to do the fourth and fifth steps as I was already going to about as many meetings as I could possibly get to. I should have gone on to 6 and 7 but decided that I wasn't entirely ready. The way I see it now, birthdays can be important milestones in recovery, milestones only tell me how far down the road I have gone, not how well I am traveling. And nothing really changes as I pass one. I needed time in recovery to really change my life, but they didn't guarantee I would do that. I like the saying that most guys a month from their last drink would be saner than most old timers who are a month from their next one. |