I have often heard it said at meetings that AA is a simple program for complicated people. When I was fairly new, I was ready to agree that I was pretty complicated but the Steps did not seem at all simple to me. The first three steps seemed to require a kind of mental gymnastics that I had attempted and failed at as a child in the church I was sent to then. The AA literature and people at meetings seemed to say they were simple, but I didn't come across any easy to follow steps on how to do them. The rest of the steps where a bit of a blur beyond the Third and Fourth which could be physically attempted.
Over time I have come to see that most of my discoveries in AA have been insights into how simple this really is, cutting away complications I have put into things. I now see the first step as recognition and acceptance that I could not guarantee my behaviour after the first drink, because there were so many instances where it changed my thinking, causing my plans to change, often radically. I am thinking of an experiment in which a group of men agreed, before starting to drink, that drunk driving was stupid and dangerous. After a few drinks, the concensus changed to the idea that a few drinks would loosen them up and make them even better drivers. When the possibility of jail came up, they decided that would be a really interesting experience.
For the Second, I came to see that Something was running things and It wasn't me. And finally seeing "care of" in the Third, I figured that I would just try to stay sober and follow my conscience(or failing that my idea of what a moral and responsible adult would do in a given situation), that Something would look after and find ways to guide me until He(She or It) stated whispering in my ear as He seemed to be doing for the other members. I have in recent years come to recognise that God often speaks through my conscience, but He still doesn't whisper in my ear and I still don't know enough about "conscious contact" to know for sure when and if I have it. I still find that life consists mostly of staying sober and sane enough for comfort by showing up when and where I think I should and doing the next right thing.
I moved here to Tasmania to retire six years ago after 20 years of teaching English in Japan, and things have gone pretty well, although, and usual, not quite the way I would have planned them, or as quickly as I might have liked. I bought an old house and set up a managed pensions to give myself an income stream. I love this town of about 25,000 and the AA group is great. I was a little disappointing to find that there is only one meeting within an hours drive when I moved here but now we have three AA meetings and an NA one that are closer than that. Life seems pretty simple now, but keeping life simple but not boring is not easy.
I can't do much about the need to do complicated things at times that seem rather daunting, but I can do a bit about my attitude to those things. Attlitudes seem to be fairly simple and they can keep these complicated things that I try to do from complicating my life and sending me into a tizzy.
I love this town and house, and this really feels like where I should be and want to be. This house in within about a 10 minute walk of about 90% of the stores in town and I am content here, and be able to make a real contribution I probably couldn't make in a larger place in several areas. I moved here because it was a top priority area for members of my religion to move to, but I have a bit of a feeling that God has tricked me to be where I want to be even if I never would have found it if thing were based on my own "rational" planning.
I'm trying to get back to showing what all this has to do with keeping it simple. I some things in life are not simple at times, even for a retiree, but I can keep life as a whole and the way I use what I have learned in recovery, by not adding complications of feelings, reactions and attitudes to allow the messy bits to dominate my life become a danger to my sanity and sobriety.
The program is simple and I'm still complicated, but at least I understand myself better now and can get honest with myself enough to not rage in indignation about the seeming unfairness of life. Things that happen that give me this feeling add a little drama to my life, and then I may just have to accept the outcome and see if I can't learn something from it.
I have been retired for six years now. A trip I just took to Sydney for a week showed me that there is nothing I do here that can't be put on hold for a week, but sometimes I feel like, even retired, it sometimes seems hard to keep up with the things I do, meetings, lawn bowls, Scrabble, volunteer tutoring and activities in my religion, Bahai. I don't like domestic chores much and do a minimum of that, not cleaning things that aren't dirty or in clear need of cutting or whatever, but I keep active. I have a car but mostly use it to go to things in other towns, doing most errands in the course of a daily walk. All this is simple as long as I think of it as that, and clearly don't require a lot of expertise.
Staying sane and sober is quite simple in that anyone can do it, but is still requires both effort and persistance. Over time doing that hasn't taken less effort but I have come more and more to enjoy doing what I do to maintain it. |