Getting Ahead
November 19, 2007 by Mark
Filed under Diseases & Conditions
This will be from our literature and pgs. 113-114 in the book “Came To Believe.”
Getting Ahead
See if you can identify with this (I can);
“Most alcoholics I have known, including myself, wanted to get ahead. If we didn’t, well, there was nothing so rosy as the dreams of success and glory which subsequently came out of the bottle; such fantasies are the warp and woof of the active alcoholics life.”
No, I don’t know what the writer meant by “warp” or “woof” except he/she wasn’t speaking of a twisted dog. I can definitely say that one of the constant disappointments in my life (to my then way of thinking) was the seemingly never-ending let downs when it came to getting ahead in life. I had many reasons, some even responsible and noble, to want to get ahead. One was probably so everyone would finally leave me alone so I could drink while all the bills were paid. Then I’d have been more than “good enough.”
The writer thinks “that one of the main differences between an active alcoholic and a recovering alcoholic can be expressed as a matter of tense. The active alcoholic tends to live in the future or in the past. The sober alcoholic, using part of the philosophy he learns in his A.A. experience, lives or strives to live in the present.”
How often I regretted so many things I cannot count. How often I feared so many things in the future I also cannot count.
“The nondrinking alcoholic discovers in A.A. that you cannot Get Ahead until you learn to be Here. We discover from our Serenity Prayer that one of the things we cannot change is time. The Here-and-Now is the only reality, whereas in the unreal world of the drinking alcoholic there was only yesterday-and-tomorrow.”
Which begs the question I was asked – “Are your head and your a** in the same place as your feet?”
“I like to think that Staying Here provides a clue to the practice of the Eleventh Step. We don’t improve our conscious contact with God, as we understand Him, by projecting into the future. After all, even the Hereafter begins with Here.”
