Celebrating 50 years of sobriety, she took down her book and marveled at the marks she made that mattered most
It was my 50th AA anniversary month and time for a good annual house cleaning. So I got down my original Big Book, a sixth printing of the Second edition, to reminisce. I was struck by the fact that there were few highlighted sections throughout its 164 pages. Just some pencil, black pen, blue highlighter and blue pen underlines. The Big Books I see in meetings today seem to be full of highlights everywhere.
I sat down and paged through my book and was intrigued to see the notations I had made. I immediately recalled where my first underline was. It was marked in faint pencil, perhaps as if I wasn’t sure the statement pertained to me. You know the one at the beginning of the chapter “More About Alcoholism” about how the delusion that I was like other people had “to be smashed.” I then went to look for the black pen underlines, recalling that tough second year of sobriety when I toiled with the Third Step and my disintegrating atheism. In that same chapter, the book suggested that failure was sure to happen if l didn’t enlarge my spiritual life. And in “We Agnostics” the book begged me not to let any prejudice against spiritual terms keep me from AA’s spiritual tools. The black underlines in my old fragile book brought me to tears, mementos of the struggle in those early years to stay sober and become teachable.
Now it was on to my blue highlights. Boy, they sure brought back those early hopeful years of discovering new faith, doing those housecleaning Steps and learning to do a Tenth step every night, even while Steps Six, Seven, Eight and Nine were ongoing. My highlighted passages in “How It Works” reminded me that I must be rid of selfishness above all else. I even singled out a phrase that’s still a vital part of my angry mind’s mantra today: The grouch and the brainstorm are “the dubious luxury of normal men.” I had also marked the sentence, “We avoid retaliation or argument.” And on the last page of “A Vision for You” a single blue highlight stands out: “The answers will come, if your own house is in order.”
As I reviewed my old book, I became lighthearted. I then sought out my blue pen underlines, knowing that they were made later when I began walking with my new God, sponsoring women as sick as I had been, and hoping to be able to repay what I had been given. My underlines told me that faith had to be accompanied by self-sacrifice. The blue pen-marked phrase I saw in “Working with Others” I hope to take to my grave: “Your job now is to be at the place where you may be of maximum helpfulness to others.”
And finally, one blue pen mark in “A Vision for You” underlines two words which I finally came to understand and have since attempted to fulfill in my life. Today I’m making a commitment by marking them again with a new yellow highlighter:
“Abandon yourself.”