I have sometimes thought that one remarkable thing about AA is that we typically have newcomers and others with decades of sobriety sitting in the same meeting, without having either get lost in confusion or bored silly. We don't talk about anything that newcomers cannot understand at some level, and, for me now, I can follow what is said, think about what is said and any topics being developed and put this together with my own thoughts and experience, so I am really sitting two or three meetings and finding them all pretty interesting.
This was a problem when the only meetings I didn't need a bullet train to get to were in Japanese. I would have to concentrate pretty hard just to try to follow with was said. If I started to think about that or the topic, I was no longer understanding what was being said. I pushed myself out the door every weekend to go to one of those meetings, partly to keep myself in the habit of going, but I feel more content now that I can go to meetings in my very own language and enjoy more than one meeting at a time.
I find meetings far from boring and feel now that the main reason I am still here is that I never got to the point where I thought or felt that I no longer needed them. |