200 years of Despair
I went to an AA meeting last night, and the turnout was quite good: more than 40 people showed up on a Monday night. There were a number of old-timers, and I guessed that between all of us–counting the guy with 4 days and the folks who number their sobriety in decades–altogether we had far more than 200 years of sobriety.
Now, I know this is a “one day at a time” program, and what really counts is maintaining healthy sobriety. Alcoholics Anonymous has a lot of cliches, and one of them is “the person in the room with the most sobriety is the person who got up earliest this morning.” But I was struck by two things. First, despite the hardships and challenges and disappointments that inevitably occur in sobriety ( our lives didn’t suddenly become perfect once we stopped drinking), everyone in that room could say that their lives had gotten better. The troubles and anguish and self-loathing that we’d all experienced had been replaced by hope and self-respect and usually much better circumstances. 200 hundred years of changed lives is quite an impressive feat.
Then I thought about the alternative: if those 200 years had instead been filled with the continued obsession, insanity and despair of rampant alcoholism. If we had all continued walking down the dead end path of drinking and drugs and denying that we had a problem. It is not hard for me to imagine the cumulative chaos that would have ensued. Of course, we wouldn’t have made it 200 years.
petermaize 