Wisdom of the Aged: Daily 12-Step Reflections for Long-Timers in Recovery

By BookBaby

"Wisdom of the Aged" is a powerful book that shares daily meditational reflections based on the author's experience living a 12-step program for nearly 50 years. This is a must-read for anyone who is going through a 12-step program or is embarking on a similar journey.

This book was not specifically written for any 12-step program such as AA, NA, OA, AOC, etc. Rather, it simply fills a gap and offers a profound perspective into the recovery process. The author's name must be kept anonymous by the very nature of the recovery program he has followed for almost 50 years. (See AA's Eleventh and Twelfth Traditions.) In addition to maintaining his own anonymity, the author has also respected the anonymity of any other individual referenced in the book. In a few cases, names have been changed to maintain absolute privacy.

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: Oct 25, 2021
• ISBN: 9781098393878

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Wisdom of the Aged

Daily 12-Step Reflections for Long-Timers in Recovery

©2021

All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

print ISBN: 978-1-09839-386-1

ebook ISBN: 978-1-09839-387-8

For Tom, with gratitude

In ordinary life, we hardly realize that we receive a great deal more than we give and that it is only with gratitude that life becomes rich.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer

Contents

Foreword

JANUARY—CLEAN AND/OR SOBER

FEBRUARY—SANITY

MARCH—SURRENDER

APRIL—SELF-KNOWLEDGE

MAY—SHARING

JUNE—SORTING THINGS OUT

JULY—SORTING THINGS OUT

AUGUST—LIST MAKING

SEPTEMBER—PAYBACK

OCTOBER—KEEP ON KEEPING ON

NOVEMBER—IS THE TRUTH OUT THERE?

December—CARRY THE MESSAGE

Why This Book?

Foreword

There is no shortage of daily readings for folks in recovery. AA has its Daily Reflections. Many of us grew up on Twenty-Four Hours a Day, although more than once I was firmly reminded that it’s not conference approved!

Hazelton and other publishers have issued dozens of other daily reflections. Even if you aren’t trying to live sober, clean, abstinent or whatever in a Twelve-Step program, many religious denominations, Eastern religions, and free-lance gurus put out their daily quotas of things to think about, affirmations to motivate, and pop-psychology for the troubled of mind, heart, and soul.

Do we need another day-by-day guide? I think we do. After more than four decades-plus in recovery, I have concluded that most daily books don’t fit me. As a very heretical quasi-Christian, I find most religious day-by-day thoughts too religious, too Christian, too me and Jesus. Many churchy daily reflections feed me a concept of God that is pretty much the Big Daddy in the Sky that Freud railed against. Secular readings and even some church-sponsored books are replete with dubious pop-psychology, magical thinking, and anthropomorphism carried to a ridiculous extreme.

Long-term, continuous sobriety has taught me a few things: I may not have all the answers, but I have a lot of the questions. I have made many, if not all, the mistakes. Since I made them sober, I remember most. One would hope I have learned not to make the same mistakes again. For years, I have been guided by wise, sober people. I have actually learned a few things from these sponsors and mentors, things that are worth sharing.

Without AA, I’d be dead or institutionalized. Hundreds of readings of AA literature, thousands of meetings, and constant cycling through the Twelve Steps have taught me a few things I consider worth sharing.

AA history tells us that the Big Book was not designed to be taken as literally as fundamentalists take the Bible. Alcoholics Anonymous was written for those who couldn’t get to meetings. Also, early AAs hoped their publishing scheme would raise some much-needed funds.

The program does not claim to be one-size-fits-all. It is suggested, not mandated. In the Big Book’s own words—the steps are "suggested as a program of recovery (3rd Edition, p. 59) and [o]ur book is meant to be suggestive only" (3rd Edition, p. 164). [Italics mine]

The very nickname Big Book did not come about because the first 100 members intended to create a definitive, quasi-Bible for recovering drunks. Those who published and marketed the first edition used the thickest paper they could get so that folks who bought the book would think they were getting their money’s worth. Hence the name, Big Book.

For me, experience, history, widespread usage, and the very text itself leave no room for maintaining that all the answers are in the Big Book. If I break my leg, I go to an orthopedist, not Chapter 3. If my marriage is falling apart, I go to a professional counselor, not to Chapter 8.

Our program tells us to find a God of our understanding. AA is not a religion, a sect, or a cult, although it has been accused at various times of being all three. Bill and Bob left the Oxford Groups because it was too churchy. When Ed, the atheist, told the early members they had to broaden the tent or folks like him would die drunk, they broadened the tent.

AA does not insist that members follow a specific creed or set of dogmas. Unlike Buddhism, AA is not atheistic. It says each of us will eventually reach a point where the only defense against the first drink is God as we understand him. So … God, yes, but God as we understand him.

That’s why I decided I need this book. When I would lay a problem on my first sponsor, he always came back with, What do you think? What would you do? This ticked me off. I was trying to get Don to shoulder my burden, solve my problem, spoon-feed me a solution. In his wisdom, he knew that I had to grow up and use the principles of the program—the Twelve Steps—to find my answers. As my late wife, who lived 43 years sober in AA, often said, People have their own answers and solutions. You just have to get out of their way.

These daily reflections will map the journey I have traveled in search of sober living in order fit myself to be of maximum service to God, as I understand him, and to my fellow travelers on the road of happy destiny. Come along if you wish. If my premises are uncomfortable or unhelpful for you, put the book down. Wisdom of the Aged is not meant to be one size fits all. It is a collection of daily thoughts based on nearly fifty years of trying to walk the walk. Join me if you choose. If you choose a different path, happy trails to you—one day at a time.

JANUARY—CLEAN AND/OR SOBER

January 1. Lessons Learned

Happy New Year! My friend Chris W got sober on New Year’s Day nearly forty years ago. We used to kid Chris that he must have had some hangover from his last New Year’s Eve party.

Like most of us, driven by pain and misery, Chris concluded he had to say when. He has not taken a drink since despite the need to care for a developmentally challenged daughter, a divorce, death of an addicted sibling, and the other routine events life dumps on most of us over the years.

Chris’s story is a template for each of us. When the time comes to say when, we may not realize it, but we have been handed a great opportunity. The gift of ego deflation at depth almost forces us to say Uncle. Misery has finally made us teachable.

If we stay sober long enough, the lessons we receive multiply. They are not always pleasant. But clean and sober, we get to come out the other side of our experiences. We start to learn to live life on life’s terms.

Skip, my first friend in AA, told me early on: You don’t have to like it. You just have to do it. Skip, by the way, is now sober for more than 50 years. I took Skip’s advice and learned that just doing it, as Nike has us believe, works for the clean and sober, too.

We tell newcomers, Things get better. Maybe. Perhaps new arrivals need to hear that. Maybe they need to cling to the hope that their lives will not be a permanent train wreck. That doesn’t make the advice true. The truth, as my late wife used to say, is ‘Things don’t get better. You do."

Today’s thought: I will think of what has not gotten better and focus on how I have been able to handle it alcohol- and drug-free.

January 2. Bottoms up

In my drinking days, bottoms up meant I had finished one vodka martini and the time had come for the next one. Sometimes, I made sure the bottom was up prematurely, so I could gulp down another drink even more quickly. They don’t call vodka martinis lunatic soup for nothing!

When I crashed and burned on alcohol on Pearl Harbor Day 1971, bottoms up had a different meaning, although I didn’t know it at the time. It meant that the jig was up. My pathetic drinking career had run its course. My bankruptcy—physical, emotional, mental, and spiritual—was complete. The USS Arizona had gone belly up 30 years earlier. I went belly up in a vodka-soaked evening climaxed by a drunken phone call to AA for help I wasn’t looking for and didn’t want.

The lesson many years later is that I can’t afford to forget that painful night. My friend, Sars B, used to say at almost every meeting, Keep the memory green. Why? Why remember pain and misery, hangovers and peeing in my pants, a failed marriage, and shoddy job performance?

Thy answer is in the question: If I keep aware of my last drunk, I won’t want to repeat it. If I remember that at least the last two years of my drinking were miserable, isolated, and paranoid, the Bud Light commercials won’t look quite so attractive.

The American philosopher George Santayana said, Those who forget history are condemned to repeat it. Those of us who have received the gift of sobriety do not need to turn Santayana’s epigram into a prophecy.

Today’s thought: I will recall my last drunk. I will keep that recollection alive. How green is that memory?

January 3. My Best Thinking

A friend of mine, sober about 17 years, is fond of saying, My best thinking got me here. I first heard that comment years ago. It sticks in my mind because it is true. I learned that truth the hard way when I finally realized that the solution to my problems did not lay in a bottle of Stoli with a splash of dry vermouth.

I pursued that illusion for the eleven and one-half years of my drinking career. Things never got better, only worse. My marriage ended. My ex took my young daughters out of my very unreliable hands. I pushed family and friends away because their very presence was a judgment of my collapsing life.

Even so, my denial was so powerful that my besotted brain wouldn’t let me look honestly at the shambles my life had become. My best thinking kept whispering in my ear, The next drink will make it all better.

Years in the fellowship, observation of folks whose thinking was as warped as mine, seeing myself slide into denial about other character defects have taught me that my best thinking on most topics stinks. That’s why I need a sponsor, why I have to seek out mentors and guides. Self-awareness and willingness to be teachable are now my best thinking.

Today’s thought: I admitted that alcohol was the source of my life’s unmanageability. When I accept the past, I don’t have to repeat it.

January 4. Victory in Defeat

The program is full of contradictions and paradoxes: Win by losing. Victory in defeat. Give it away to get it. When I stumbled into my first meeting, I saw the slogans on the wall. They looked like cheesy motivational posters.

I thought: I’ve wandered into Ding Dong School! How could such banal platitudes help anyone recover from anything? This was like Dale Carnegie and Norman Vincent Peale dumbed down for the mentally challenged.

Funny thing. The longer I stayed sober, the more the platitudes rang true in my own life. The further away I got from my last drink, the more I depended on these trite aphorisms to help me keep my next drink at arm’s length. The more bumps I hit on the road of happy destiny, the harder I leaned on things like Keep it simple, Easy does it, One day at a time.

Maybe increasingly longer-term sobriety was dumbing me down. Maybe my alcohol-befuddled brain was turning to tapioca before my course of three-score and ten years had been run. Or maybe, just maybe, I was slowly getting it. Sayings become platitudes, not because they are stale, but because they have intrinsic wisdom that never loses its freshness.

A friend of mine in the program once gave me a list of all the slogans he had compiled. They summarized, he said, the common wisdom of the AA fellowship. I wish I had kept that list. These days, as my circuits are starting to misfire, I need all the wisdom I can get.

Today’s thought: I will reflect for a few minutes on which of the common sayings I have heard in the rooms have been most helpful over the years.

January 5. Win by Losing

There is another pseudo-slogan of the program that makes newcomers question what loony bin they’ve ended up in: I have to lose to win.

I asked myself: Didn’t I just lose the toughest battle of my life? Didn’t booze kick my butt? My wife left with my two small daughters. My income has been cut in unequal halves. The divorce—even less fun— will come eighteen months later.

Then, I got to one of my first AA meetings, and some guy I’ve never met before tells me I have to win by losing. I heard people saying, I’m a grateful alcoholic. Might as well say I’m a grateful diabetic or a grateful cancer patient was my reaction.

Fortunately, I was so wrecked by alcohol that I didn’t protest. I was teachable, principally because I had run out of options. So, I stuck around, stayed confused for a while, stuck around some more, and slowly began to see the far shore of recovery.

After years alcohol-free, I could say that hitting a bottom with John Barleycorn was indeed the best thing that had ever happened to me— based on my own experience, not someone else’s infallible proclamation, someone’s fiat, or someone’s mandatory legislation.

My mind got better. My health got better. My ability to handle situations that used to baffle me got better. I got better.

Then things got worse. I still got better. I had learned to win by losing. I am a grateful alcoholic—not because I have the disease alcoholism, but because I have been given the gift of recovery in AA. Today, the principles of the program are the only way I know how to live my life.

Today’s thought: Am I convinced that it is possible to win by losing in the program? Have I seen others do it? Have I experienced this change in my own life?

January 6. Admitting vs. Accepting

When I was getting sober in New York City, it was faddish to debate the relative meanings and merits of admitting vs. accepting. Anyone who has seen the window shade with the 12 Suggested Steps has surely noticed that Step One talks about admitting that alcohol has stolen any power we might claim.

There is nothing in the Twelve Suggested Steps that talks about accepting. You have to reach page 407 of the paperback edition of the Big Book before acceptance is called the key to sober living.

Now, I’m not a program Fundamentalist. I don’t believe that only the first 164 pages of the Big Book count. I worked in publishing. I know how books get made longer: thicker paper, wider margins, larger type, prefaces and forewords, after-words, and appendices.

Bulk may be one reason the first 100 stuck in the stories. However, they also knew from experience that we get sober by sharing our journey. That is what the stories do, more effectively than pages 1 through 164.

The Big Book like, I suspect, the Christian Bible and the Islamic Koran was not created to be cherry-picked to support some militant’s point of view. It was not designed to solve the debate over admitting vs. accepting.

You can pluck lines out of context to prove that admitting our alcoholism isn’t enough. You can collect lines that tell you that the program equivalent of hell awaits those who fail to reach the empyrean of accepting their alcoholism.

That’s never struck me as the essence of the program. When I took the first step, when I admitted that I could no longer safely drink, as my first sponsor constantly reminded me, I was in the fellowship. Nobody had to sign me up. Nobody had to punch my ticket. Nobody had a secret handshake to share. Nobody said I had to accept my alcoholism or even like it.

When I admitted my alcoholism, I gained entry to the miracle of recovery in AA. No ifs, ands, or buts. No need to accept.

Today’s thought: Do I cherry-pick program materials to find the answers I want, or do I accept the wisdom given me in the literature, at meetings, and in conversations with sponsors and mentors?

January 7. You Don’t Have to Like It

I didn’t much like the program or the fellowship when I skulked through the doors into my first church basement. Everyone looked too clean. Folks were smiling. Some were even laughing. Many where chatting with friends.

I was not all that clean. I had passed out drunk the night before. I certainly wasn’t smiling. There was little—if anything—in my life to smile about. I certainly did not expect ever to laugh again. Ashamed of what I had become, I had purposefully distanced myself from friends and family.

My mother was still in my life, more by default than by choice; more because I had no place else to go, nowhere to take my two small daughters during my Saturday visitations. Besides, Mom still had money to buy vodka. I didn’t have much. And Mom didn’t drink a lot, which meant more for me.

Over time, I learned that I could smile—and even laugh—again. I lost my resentment at the guy who told me my misery would be gladly refunded at the door if I didn’t like AA. I began to make friends—slowly and cautiously. After all, when alcohol has made you paranoid, it’s hard to learn to trust people again.

Now, I’m the guy smiling and joking when a candidate ripe for plucking walks in the door. I also strive to be the guy whose hand is stretched out, who says, Welcome, I’m glad you’re here.

The program says, When anyone anywhere reaches out for help, I want the hand of AA always to be there and for that I am responsible.

That hand is mine. It needs to be there.

Today’s thought: Am I so involved with AA friends that I don’t even notice the newcomer holding back, waiting for someone to stretch out the hand of welcome?

January 8. The Elephant’s Graveyard

I have grown old in the program. I have seen and experienced things that many young people aren’t even aware of. Take the old black and white Tarzan movies, for example.

My generation thought Johnny Weissmuller was cool, although that cliché hadn’t even been invented yet. Making friends with jungle animals, beating up the bad guys, parroting the call of the apes—how cool is that?

One of the scary things in the Tarzan movies—at least for me—was the elephants’ graveyard. Before the days of poachers and elephants as an endangered species, the films accepted the premise that elephants went off to a special place to die. Their secret graveyard was easy picking for ivory thieves. Tarzan, of course, kept the bad guys from exploiting the resting place of these magnificent creatures.

When I walked into my first church basement, I figured I had arrived at the elephant’s graveyard: life would be bleak, gray, and surrounded by the skeletons of any good times I might have had. Oddly enough, I accepted that fate. A dull, eventless life was a major improvement over the train wreck I brought to that first meeting.

Then, Bill W’s rosy forecast started to come true. As I stayed sober, I emerged into the sunshine of the spirit. Try to explain that to a woman or man one week off the sauce. Try to tell them that life will not always be one bleak day after another.

Try to tell me that as a newcomer, and I might have laughed in your face—if I had even recovered the ability to laugh. Today, years later, try to tell me you’re stuck in the elephant’s graveyard, and I’ll tell you, Wait a bit. Pretty soon technicolor will be invented.

Today’s thought: Have I moved from doom and gloom to the sunshine of the spirit? Do I know someone who needs a helping hand to make the same journey?

January 9. Uncle Miltie

Trust and alcohol don’t mix too well. We get sober or clean, and our families don’t trust us. With good reason. We have too often destroyed any expectation they might have had that this time it will work.

In his story, Bill tells us that his doctor feared that Bill’s last hospitalization might be his final one. Our cofounder, it seems, had played his one remaining card in the game of trust.

Family, friends, and employers aren’t the only ones who run out of trust. I didn’t trust myself when I put the plug in the jug. I had never seriously tried to stop drinking. I wasn’t sure I could do it.

God was another object of my mistrust. I blamed my Higher Power for my alcoholism, my failed marriage, my hatred of my job and my boss, and anything else that needed a scapegoat. It was a lot easier, at least for me, to play the victim, to blame this God I allegedly hated than to grow up and take responsibility for putting my life in the dumpster.

And since it was God’s fault, how could I trust this power greater than me to fix me, to keep me sober, to rescue me when I was among the lost? God—whoever or whatever he/she/it was— would inevitably betray me again.

I felt like Milton Berle. One of the running jokes on Uncle Miltie’s show was that any time he said the word make up, a stagehand rushed out and whacked Berle across the face with a sock full of face powder. This always got a laugh. Newly sober, I wasn’t laughing. I was waiting for this Higher Power to blindside me with a relapse or a catastrophe. I kept waiting for the other shoe to drop. Oddly enough, that didn’t happen, at least not early in sobriety.

I have never had to relapse. Life has blind-sided me more than once. I have had my share of catastrophes. But, when life pushed me into a ditch, my Higher Power was the one pulling me out, not the cause of my falling in.

Today’s thought: Have I learned to trust my Higher Power, to trust the process of recovery? It works if I work it.

January 10. Forever Jung

AA has often claimed Carl Jung as one of its forebears. In December of 1993, an anonymous letter to the New York Times sent by Bob P of Riverside, Connecticut, described how an American named Rowland Hazard sought a cure for his alcoholism from the renowned Swiss psychiatrist, Carl Jung, in 1932, three years before AA’s founding.

Hazard was hopeless when he arrived. After a year of treatment by Dr. Jung, he remained hopeless. The eminent Swiss discharged his patient, telling him he was beyond help.

Despairing of a cure, Hazard asked, Is there no hope, then?

Jung’s reply, undoubtedly sadly given by one so compassionate, was, No, there is none—except that some people with your problem have recovered if they have had a transforming experience of the spirit.

Through the Oxford Movements, Hazard eventually experienced this inner transformation. He passed it on to Ebby Thatcher, another drunk, who passed it on to Bill W. By thus carrying the message, Ebby became Bill’s sponsor, and despite a spotty record of continuous sobriety, he was always considered as such by Bill.

What’s the point? There are two points: First if we don’t hit our unique bottom and encounter the ultimate state of despair that transforms us, we don’t get sober. Second, the message that such a transforming experience can be achieved is most effectively delivered by one drunk sharing with another.

Other treatments for alcoholism have evolved. Most pale in comparison to the program’s successful record of one drunk helping another.

Hang on to your bottom. You may not believe it yet, but that bottom is the greatest gift you have been given. Share it with the next shaky, hungover person who walks into your meeting. That’s the only hope any of us has. It’s the only gift we can offer each other.

Today’s thought: Have I accepted that my alcoholic bottom was the greatest gift I have ever received?

January 11. How Does It Work?

Dr. Carl Jung said for sobriety to work the individual has to have a transforming experience. Harry M. Tiebout, Bill W’s psychiatrist and an ardent early supporter of Alcoholics Anonymous, said we drunks had to undergo surrender in the therapeutic process to get sober. In AA, being mostly non-professional and at least mildly anti-intellectual, we say you have to hit a bottom.

Transforming experience. Surrender. Hitting bottom. As pithy as those concepts are, do they tell us how AA works? No one has ever given me a satisfactory explanation. Maybe there is none. Maybe it doesn’t matter. Whenever someone asked a friend of mine how AA works, he said, Just fine.

Alcohol grabbed me by the nape of the neck. Excessive intake of that substance led to ethanol addiction. Ethanol is the active ingredient in everything from Maker’s Mark to Chateauneuf-du-pape. Whether we’re drinking $3 Wild Irish Rose or 100-year-old single malt scotch, the ethanol gets us every time.

So how did AA work? What got me sober? Don’t know; don’t care is the short answer. I haven’t had to drink in a long, long time. My life was painful. I wanted the pain to go away. Alcohol had stopped working. AA taught me how to stop drinking. The pain and misery went away.

Folks told me to plug the jug. They said I only had to stop drinking a day at a time. They predicted I would get better—slowly, over time. Out of options, I believed them. I believed because people in the rooms told me that’s how they had escaped the deadly merry-go-round of alcohol addiction. It worked. How and why are beyond my ability to understand.

I am very pragmatic. The suggestions worked when I tried them. Consequently, I have never seen a reason to try some other formula. In poker, nobody throws in a hand with four aces. Why should I gamble my life looking for some dubious fix for my alcoholism? I already have a solution. And it works just fine.

Today’s thought: I have experienced the effectiveness of the program in the ups and downs of life. It has never failed me.

January 12. What Do You Mean We? Part 1

I get drunk. We get sober.

How often have you heard that said at a meeting? Is this notion of a fellowship, a bunch of drunks, as the source of sobriety a truth or a truism? Is it our collective experience, or is it a way to make the doubting newcomer conform?

I’m Bronx Irish. When I got to AA, I heard the term fellowship bandied around. This was a fairly strange term to me. Fellowship is a Protestant word. We never used it at St. Barnabas Church in Bellmore, Long Island.

Slowly, I began to realize that these folks were serious. AA was a fellowship, a group of people hanging on to one another for dear life, like survivors in a lifeboat.

As a group, we have embraced the common purpose of helping each other to achieve and maintain sobriety. Ben Franklin allegedly told the Founding Fathers: Gentlemen, if we don’t hang together, we shall all hang separately. He could have been talking to us.

The early request to broaden the tent by adding as we understand him when referring to God was not about theology. It was a plea for inclusion, for acceptance, for fellowship.

When I showed up at my first meeting, nobody asked my religion, my political party, my sexual orientation, or the size of my bank balance. They said, If you have a problem with alcohol and want to stop drinking, we can help you. They did. And they still do. That’s what the we in we admitted is all about.

Today’s thought: Do I believe in the power of we in my life? Do I make sure to include the newcomer in that we?

January 13. What Do You Mean We? Part 2

Ours is a disease of isolation. Most of us end up alone, drinking ourselves into solitary oblivion. Certainly, that’s how I drank.

Then, I went to my first church basement. I heard, I get drunk. We get sober. Only the group could save me. I didn’t doubt that. I couldn’t afford to. I knew beyond a doubt that I had gotten me drunk.

So, I accepted the group as my first Higher Power since I was nurturing a colossal resentment toward God. Then I learned I had to get an even more intimate we. I had to get a sponsor. I had to learn to share my darkest secrets with another person.

I am a loner. I enjoy my own company. I don’t easily let anyone in close. Maybe that’s a defense mechanism from the dysfunctional family that raised me. Maybe it’s a personality trait. I don’t know. I am quite simply a very private person. I am uncomfortable among strangers, in crowded groups, and in new situations.

The we of sponsorship goes against everything my introverted personality cherishes. But I wasn’t given a choice. Early on, a guy grabbed me and said he’d be my sponsor. As I progressed in sobriety, I discovered that only a caring, wise individual could steer me along the twists and turns of sober living.

I learned to rely on the experience, strength, and hope of another sober individual. Gradually, I realized that one way my Higher Power did for me what I could not do for myself was through the wisdom and example of another sober drunk.

We became the mechanism through which I broke loose from the isolation of my disease. There is, I learned over time, truly strength in numbers.

Today’s thought: Am I willing to move out of the comfort zone of isolation and reach out for the hand of help?

January 14. Take It or Leave It

Not at my first meeting, not at any meeting since, did anyone tell me, My way or the highway. Our program of recovery is suggested. Credibility is based on shared successful experience, not revelations from on high.

The program has been accused of being a cult, and in certain instances that has been the case. I have never experienced that distortion of AA. I have known people who had "their