STEP 12: Having bad a spiritual awakening as the result of these steps, we tried to carry this message to alcoholics, and to practice these principles in all our affairs.
“There are only two things you have to do to stay sober,” the old-timer with the gravel voice told me. “Don’t drink one day at a time and change the rest of your life.”
I’d been hitting one or two meetings a week for about a year and was binge drinking between shrinking intervals of white-knuckle abstinence. What the old guy said sounded grandiose enough to keep me interested. The rest of your life–just the kind of adventure that appealed to a crusader like me. This one-day-at-a-time stuff was for lightweights.
Fingering the white chip I carried around to impress AA people who took me aside at meetings, I thought maybe I’d get one of those things for real some day. That would be the first day of the rest of my life. This rang true with the sixties jargon I’d often used to give my drinking and drugging the status of a political statement and spiritual quest.
When I finally did pick up my “real” white chip, the circumstances of my life had deteriorated enough that I was grateful just for the daily reprieve I got at meetings from fear and self-loathing. Losing a marriage, home, belongings, business, money–for a while I didn’t want anything more than for life to be semi-normal.
But now, at eleven years, listening to speakers who are a year or two sober, I am reminded of a phase of my sobriety that I sometimes long for. Newcomers have an urgency in their voices and an intense, earnest look in their eyes when they talk about what life is like for them. I remember the passionate awakenings and lightning-flash realizations I experienced from working the Steps with my sponsor.
An older man recently told me, “This is the third day of the rest of your life.” On the third day of the rest of your life, the lessons of the first day don’t carry the same voltage. The failure, pain, loss, and guilt that forced me to those actions and which gave the simplest advice an after-ring of profound wisdom–that’s all easy to forget when life today seems like it’s been too normal for too long.
But when I get complacent enough, the drive to satisfy instincts first gains momentum. I start looking for something outside myself to get that jolt I liked so much, slamming down a few quick shots at the beginning of a bender. I have this nagging memory that drinking once worked well for me, but even drinking I was distant, self-conscious, apart from. I thought this is how the rest of my life would be: quiet, desperate isolation interrupted occasionally by a good drunk.
In the beginning of sobriety I worked the program the same way, “doing up” the Steps quickly, the same way I did up shots of tequila and Panama red, waiting for the magic moment when the right chemicals would suddenly open a door in the invisible wall that separated me from whatever I was doing or whoever I was with.
Booze did actually sometimes give me what I know today is relief from the burden of self. I did a few small things while drunk that I’m still proud of. But our Eleventh and Twelfth Steps have provided a much more practical and sustainable experience with it.
Trouble is, I’m missing that feeling of selfless engagement now in sobriety. At one, two, and three years sober, I spoke frequently at meetings and commitments. And I remember others laughing with me and thanking me after meetings for the fervor of my story and my commitment to carrying the message. True to form, though sober long enough to know better, I still want the old electricity without the discomfort and hard work that produced it.
That profound feeling of connection with the truth of what I’m saying at the very moment I’m saying it eludes me now. I have a lot of AA advice and quotes and page numbers from the Big Book on the tip of my tongue. And I’m grateful for what I have today. But on the third day of the rest of my life, I have memories of burning with a hotter flame.
Fortunately, I also have the continuing guidance of Steps Eleven and Twelve, and of other sober alcoholics. Understanding that I haven’t arrived on a spiritual plateau, that I can only make progress, gives me the willingness, the vitality, and sometimes the sharp yearning to live this one day as if it were the first, not the third, day of the rest of my life. For my jags of envy and fantasy about days gone by, I know that the answer is still more spiritual growth.
The old-timer who told me about changing the rest of my life is still around, and he still reminds me that, one day at a time, it just keeps getting better. Having done the high-voltage alternative about as much and as long as I could stand it, I think I’ll just live today as if he might be right. If it works all right, I’ll try it again tomorrow.