Change to Spare

AA Grapevine® - Our Meeting in Print Online February 2007 Vol. 63 No. 9
The best things in life aren't things
When I was still drinking, longtime friends would sometimes ask what I was up to, and I'd answer that I was in transition. I was a musician and a carpenter who couldn't find enough work, so I bounced from job to job. "It's never boring," I assured anyone who asked. "And everything changes, right?"

Vain about my detachment from career, financial security, or any real focus, I touted what I thought was freedom Ñ that is, until I heard a sober alkie speak about it at a meeting. Until then, I didn't know I suffered from terminal restlessness. "Self-will run riot" is never boring. Neither are fear and chaos and skirmishing through life. I knew nothing about true happiness, not even that I didn't know.

When I got sober and started working the AA program, old drinking friends offered condolences and chemical substitutes while I cleaned up my act. "Don't wanna change too radically, do you?" someone asked. My family wanted to know "what is he into this time, and how long will this fixation last?"

The loss of a small business, a ten-year marriage, and all my property and money kept me bound to a steady paycheck during my first few years of sobriety. I had a sponsor and a weekly home group, but I also traveled, visited, and test-marketed many other meetings. I was also single, so I kept an open door to relationships.

There was always the next new thing to try, a new page to turn, a new chapter to start, or something else just down the road that would be better than what I had. It would be different this time, too, and it would give me that satisfied feeling that I remembered from the few times when booze got my brain chemistry just right. Drinking taught me that getting to the next level required burning some bridges. So, for years I prepared myself to drop everything, walk away, and start over when the next new thing called.

I didn't see myself trying to locate myself at the center of the universe, searching for just the right intersection of job, relationship, friends, possessions -- a magic geometry of people, places and things that would let me love myself. Given sobriety, a patient sponsor, the willingness to work the Twelve Steps, and eventually some professional help, I slowly came to understand. Now, I've come to believe.

After twenty years of drinking and eighteen years sober Ñ twelve of those investing time, money, and talent in work that I love, but work that has yet to yield a balanced livelihood Ñ I'm on the threshold of yet another major change: a two-year graduate program that will open a path to a well-established career. This new direction is not something the fly-by-night, under-employed, stoned musician would have been willing to think about, much less act on.

Working the AA program has given me the faith that opportunity, understanding, and growth are inherent to mistakes and misfortune. And success is more a state of heart and mind than a sum total of material assets. I've learned that the best things in life aren't things, so today I pray for my Higher Power's will to be done, and for the power to carry that out.

I'm not burning any bridges this time, either. I'm not leaving behind any baggage, unfinished business, or unfulfilled promises. This change has grown slowly from my sober encounters with risk and adversity. My decision comes after years of prayer and meditation and long talks with other sober alcoholics. This time I'm bringing everything I've learned and most of the people, places, and things that I cherish along with me.

I'm not uprooting myself, turning a corner, or shooting off in a different direction. Rather, I am following an outgrowth and extension of the central fact of my life. Sober emotional stamina and patience give me a sense of continuity that I never knew existed when I was drinking and new to AA. I understand now why Bill W., in Twelve Steps and Twelve Traditions, considered prayer, meditation, and self-searching to be "intensely practical" and "would no more do without [them] than we would refuse air, food, or sunshine."

With this great set of tools to bring to a new career, this change isn't a magic bullet or a departure. It isn't the solution to all my problems, and it isn't going to fix me. But man, is it ever gonna be fun!
Anonymous
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