Marty Mann Speaking in San Francisco – 12/11/1946

(0:00 – 0:41)
Since my coming into AA, I have had many, many happy surprises and very, many very
happy moments. But I don’t know of any one single moment in my life to date in AA than
I have in introducing to you the speaker of the evening, Marty Mann, AA at large. Thank
you.
(0:52 – 1:05)
Warren said it for me. I came out here, I had the opportunity to come out here, on
business. And my business has to do with alcoholism.
(1:07 – 2:17)
It has to do, as a matter of fact, with an estimated three million alcoholics who are not in
the happy position that we are in. It has to do with those alcoholics whom I call
prisoners, prisoners of their own condition, prisoners of their own ignorance as to what is
the matter with them, what this thing is that’s getting them down. They’re like so many
of us were before we came into AA.
We didn’t know why we couldn’t be like other people. We didn’t know why we couldn’t
drink like other people. And we kept on trying in the face of repeated failures.
My job today is to try and reach those people, to try and teach them what their trouble is
and that they can get well. And I know that because of us. I know that because there are
over 30,000 of us in Alcoholics Anonymous who have got well.
(2:17 – 2:53)
Well, my business is good in my private books because it gives me an opportunity to do
something else than that. It gives me an opportunity to meet AA groups all over the
country. I’ve not been anywhere, and I’ve been to more than 50 cities, where I haven’t
met the better part of the AAs in that city, where I haven’t been to their meetings and
been to their clubhouses and sat down and talked to a lot of them.
(2:53 – 5:53)
And as an AA, you perhaps can guess what that has meant to me. That’s the role in
which I am here tonight. I’m not here on business.
I’m here on pleasure. I’m here in my private capacity, and that is simply as an AA
member. One of more than 30,000 men and women who have found their way out of
their terrible dilemma through Alcoholics Anonymous.
It so happens that that is the thing of which I am the proudest in the world, to be a
member of Alcoholics Anonymous. I don’t know of anything that I value higher. I don’t
know of anything in the world that could happen or could be that I could ever value
higher.
It has been first in my life for close to eight years, ever since I first heard of it in March
1939. It obviously was first in my life of necessity for quite a long time, just as it has
been in all of your lives, because it was life. Without it, I had been facing death.
Without it, I had twice attempted to find death more quickly, because death to me was
preferable to the way I was. And when I found AA, it really was life, and the promise of
life. It was hope, and it was everything that was good.
I’ve never had any reason to change that feeling. I hope I never will. I don’t believe I ever
will.
I can’t imagine feeling differently. So the thing that I am first is a member of Alcoholics
Anonymous, and the thing that comes first to me is AA as a program and as a whole. I
wanted to tell you something about what AA means to me, because that’s all I have to
offer as another member of AA.
You all know as well as I do that none of us has the monopoly on the only way of
interpreting the program of Alcoholics Anonymous. I’ve learned quite a lot about that in
my travels. In the last two years and two months, I have been going constantly from one
city to another, and I’ve gone from the north to the south and from the east to the west
of these United States.
(5:54 – 7:27)
And in all those cities, I’ve noticed that the groups are inclined to do things differently,
and members of the groups within the groups do it differently. Some sections of the
country have developed techniques of their own, approaches to this thing, ways of
handling it, ways of organizing themselves and managing their affairs that are quite
different from the way it’s done in some other places. And like all of you, I started in my
own group and I was in it long enough to get very used to its ways, and at first it was a
little startling.
It wasn’t the way they did it in New York, so was it AA? You know how we all feel when
we go somewhere else. That is inclined to be our first reaction. And I’ve seen it in some
places so very different that I did wonder at first.
But I’ve been fortunate enough in most cases to stay quite a bit in one place. Well, not
so very long, perhaps only four or five days. But in that time, I’ve been able to talk to
and get to know a lot of the members, to spend considerable time in many places at
their clubhouses, to get beneath the surface of what I had seen first in the way of
different approaches and different techniques.
(7:27 – 8:22)
And I’ve discovered the same thing over and over again, that in spite of any surface
differences one might find, in spite of any different methods of approach and different
ways of working at this thing, when you got underneath a bit, you found that the
fundamentals were identical. That the things that they believed and the things that they
were striving for and their ways of talking about it and the conversations that were held
on the whole business were as like as ball bearings. Fundamentally then, all of us who
are members of AA, anywhere in the country, and I guess by now I can say practically
anywhere in the world, we’re spreading far beyond the United States, fundamentally
we’re pretty much alike.
(8:25 – 8:44)
After all, we’re working on the same program. They’re the same twelve steps that we
use, no matter what accent we speak them with. And as long as we stick to those, we
can’t be so very different in fundamentals.
(8:46 – 9:14)
But one of the wonderful things about those twelve steps to me has always been their
extreme flexibility. They are capable of many interpretations. I believe really that if you
sat down and talked, if you attempted to make a study of AA members everywhere,
you’d probably find as many interpretations of the AA program as we have members.
(9:15 – 9:36)
Everybody has their own private notion of just what the AA program means. Overall, we
can agree on phrases. In New York, we call it a design for living, and I’ve heard that
phrase said in many, many other places to describe it.
(9:39 – 10:05)
But a design for living, if it’s going to work for an individual, has to suit him or her. It has
to be able to let him into it, so to speak, to let him use it. And if it’s going to do that for
so many different kinds of people as we have and as we are, it’s got to be flexible.
(10:05 – 10:28)
That’s one of its great strengths, I think, that I can find what AA means for me, and
having found that, I can make it work for me. And I can interpret it in a way that is good
for me and that helps me to grow. And so can you, each and every one of you.
(10:31 – 11:10)
Those interpretations are often not nearly as different as we think they are on the
surface. I think that fundamentally, again, if we got underneath them, we’d find that they
were not as different as they seem. And yet, in arguing and discussing the pros and cons
of this way and that way of working AA, we sometimes think we’re poles apart.
We’re not. We interpret it according to our own needs at the time. That gives us still
greater variation.
(11:18 – 11:58)
The twelve steps mean something very different to me today than they meant to me the
first time I ever read them, in March 1939. In those days, they had one significant
application, so far as I was concerned. I was a person who had had great difficulties with
treatment.
I wasn’t what we call in New York a high-bottom baby. I was very definitely a low-bottom
baby. Practically everything had happened to me, and I had lost everything.
(12:00 – 12:47)
When I arrived at the point of AA, I was in complete and utter despair. I had made every
other effort I knew of. I had sought help.
And after a long period of time in which I could find none, I had found help. But for me, it
wasn’t enough. And in spite of that help, in spite of the fact that I was in a sanitarium
and under intensive psychiatric treatment, every now and then I’d go off the rails.
I’d drink. And every time I drank, I fell flat on my face all over again. I got drunk.
(12:49 – 13:30)
When that had happened a number of times, in spite of all the effort I was making, and I
really was making an effort, because that, in my mind, was my last hope, I really knew
despair. It was at that point that my doctor gave me a manuscript copy of Alcoholics
Anonymous to read. The first thing that happened to me in reading it was a clear
explanation that I could accept, which was more important than it being a clear
explanation, of what my trouble was.
(13:31 – 14:40)
Like many of us, I had been laboring under the delusion that my primary trouble was
mental. First, I had thought I was having a nervous breakdown, and when it went on and
on and grew worse and worse, I thought it was a serious mental collapse. And in the last
few months of my drinking, I was sure that I was hopelessly insane.
I was bad in those last few months. There were days on end when I couldn’t get out of
bed, when I couldn’t even swallow the liquor that I needed in order to be able to get out
of bed. When I lay on that bed hour after hour and day after day, and I didn’t know
whether it was night or day or Wednesday or Sunday or August or February, and I went
through those sweats that we all know, and the cold chills and the horrors, and I didn’t
know whether these things had happened or whether I’d dreamed them and I didn’t dare
ask.
(14:42 – 15:03)
And I lay with my eyes shut if anyone came in the room so they wouldn’t say anything to
me. That was plain, unadulterated hell. And in that period, I was sure that I had lost what
little vestiges of sanity there were left.
(15:06 – 17:05)
Well, we go back to the time over a year later, in that last ghastly summer of 1937, when
I was in a good sanitarium and getting good treatment. And I still held the theory that
this was mental collapse, and that when I got those things straightened out in my
thinking, when I got my mind all cleared up, I would, of course, be able to drink normally
again. After all, I had been a normal drinker for ten years before it began to catch up
with me.
I’d been a rather remarkably good drinker. I’d always been able to drink everybody else
under the table, in quantity, and still walk and talk and get them all home and remember
what happened. That lasted a good many years, that ability, before it began to slip.
And I remembered it very clearly. I’d been awfully proud of it. I wanted to be able to do
that again.
I wanted to be able to drink that way again. And I couldn’t see any reason in all that I had
learned in psychiatry, through my treatment, why, if I was straightening out a lot of the
things that had apparently made me drink too much, if I got those all cleared up and
straightened out and had some real insight into my difficulties and was able to cope with
them, why I couldn’t drink like that again. I don’t think I thought it out quite that clearly
then, but I think that’s the basis of the delusion so many of us nurse, that if we do
something about all this long enough, we’ll be able to go back to normal drinking.
(17:07 – 17:37)
I think that is the reason why I had trouble even in the sanitarium. I think that
consciously or unconsciously I was going out and trying this thing, to see if I’d made
enough progress to have arrived there yet. And when I found that I hadn’t, that taking a
drink immediately led to another drunk, then I lost all hope because I figured that
nothing was happening.
(17:40 – 20:10)
So the first thing that meant a great deal to me in Alcoholics Anonymous was the
definition I found there of just what was the matter with me. There in that book I read for
the first time alcoholism is a disease. Alcoholics are sick.
They have a very special kind of a disease. It’s both mental and physical. There I read for
the first time the definition, which I think is so important.
Alcoholism is an obsession of the mind coupled with an allergy of the body. And there I
saw explained to me that in AA or out of it, or by any other means, nothing could ever be
done about that allergy of the body. Once that change had taken place, it could never be
changed back.
And that as long as I lived, or any other alcoholic, they would never be able to safely
touch alcohol again. I read there a comparison that made sense. They said this is like
diabetes.
When the diabetic finds that he is diabetic, he also learns that he can’t have any more
sugar. He’s got to learn to live without sugar. He’s got to maintain a rigid diet.
He’s got to take insulin fairly regularly. Well, in AA we can’t do anything about your
allergy. You’ve got to stay away from alcohol.
That’s all you can do about that. But we can do something about the obsession of the
mind. We can help you to overcome that.
In other words, we can teach you how to maintain that rigid diet. We can give you your
insulin in the form of our program, which will teach you how to live without alcohol,
which will help you stay away from the first drink. But you’ve got an obsession.
An obsession is a powerful thing. It’s not just a habit. A habit can be broken without too
much effort.
(20:10 – 20:21)
If alcoholism were merely a habit, we wouldn’t all be here. We wouldn’t have to. We
could have found a dozen ways out.
(20:23 – 20:38)
This is something 10,000 times more powerful than a habit. It’s an obsession. And an
obsession needs something tremendous to help break its hold on the individual.
(20:40 – 20:49)
Those are the things I saw in my very first reading of Alcoholics Anonymous. That’s what
it meant to me. It made sense.
(20:51 – 21:20)
I was one of those who was simply delighted to find that I had a specific disease called
alcoholism. In my case, that was infinitely better than what I had come to think I had. In
that sanitarium where I had spent a year, there were many houses with a large plot of
ground, and it had all kinds of cottages and buildings on it.
(21:26 – 22:11)
It was called the Violin Little Golf Course. And off somewhere near the gate at the other
end of a little golf course they had was a place we called the Violin House. People were
brought there sometimes in desperate case.
They were brought in strained in straitjackets and strapped down with leather,
screaming, completely mad and insane. And they were kept down there sometimes quite
a while. And then there was a house that was sort of a miscellaneous house, I guess,
where most of the people that weren’t in that bad condition, or who were getting better,
mixed around with each other.
(22:12 – 22:27)
That’s where I was. And there was another house near the front gate, and that didn’t
have as close supervision. There wasn’t a nurse at the head of the stairs that you
couldn’t get by, for instance.
(22:27 – 22:38)
You could get in and out of there freely. And we among ourselves called that the
Graduate House. That’s where people usually spent the last few weeks before they went
home.
(22:39 – 23:06)
Well, during the year that I was there, I had actually seen people brought into the Violin
House screaming mad. And in a while they’d moved up to the house where I was. And
while they weren’t completely well and absolutely normal when they first came, they
gradually became so before my very eyes.
(23:07 – 23:17)
And after a period of time, it might be several months, they moved into the Graduate
House. And a little later they went home. But I stayed.
(23:20 – 23:35)
I didn’t move up any further. And after I’d seen this happen a number of times, I did
some pretty deep thinking. I didn’t know what it was that ailed me then, but I figured it
must be pretty grim.
(23:36 – 24:24)
If people that came in, obviously insane, could get well and go out, and I, who had
walked in there sober under my own steam, was still there, likely to be there indefinitely
as far as I could see, if they keep me. I had come to the conclusion that my trouble was
something very desperately serious. And so when I read that it was a thing called
alcoholism, which was a disease, that it was like diabetes, which required certain specific
treatments and certain specific effort on my part, and in that case I could get well, and
there were at that time nearly a hundred people who had got well.
(24:24 – 24:31)
Boy, that seemed like a lot of people to me then. I thought that was wonderful. I felt
marvelous about it.
(24:31 – 25:06)
I was tickled to death to be an alcoholic. Of course, that’s always made it a little hard for
me to really work understandingly with those people that find it so difficult to admit that
they’re alcoholics, and I know most people do. But when I first discovered that, and was
glad to admit that I was an alcoholic, I was interested in the AA program for one thing
and one thing only.
(25:08 – 25:26)
I wanted to learn how to stay away from the first drink. The highest goal in my life, my
highest idea, was to learn how to stay sober. All I wanted was not to drink too much.
(25:28 – 25:37)
I’d wanted that before. Now I knew that meant that all I wanted was not to drink, period.
And I accepted that.
(25:38 – 25:51)
That was a high goal, and it wasn’t always easy. I’m not one of those that came into AA
and never touched another drink. I wish I were.
(25:52 – 26:06)
But I had some difficulty in the first year and a half. I had three slips, as we call them. It
wasn’t easy for me, and therefore that goal seemed to me very, very high.
(26:08 – 26:45)
It was my sole purpose in coming into Alcoholics Anonymous, and I believe that it is the
sole purpose of almost everyone who comes to us. They come to us to learn how to get
sober and stay sober, period. Well, as time went on, and I began to feel a little more
certain, perhaps, that that might be accomplished, I became aware that I had a higher
goal.
(26:48 – 27:17)
I realized that I wanted to do more than just stay sober. We had a woman in the New
York group at that time, Equality, who had a phrase she used whenever she spoke. She
said, it’s the quality of your sobriety that counts, not the length of time.
(27:18 – 27:41)
It happened that she’d been sober for nearly five years before she knew about AA, and
then she had been drunk for two or three in between, but she’d had a long stretch of
sobriety. And in describing it, she often said to us that it hadn’t amounted to very much.
It wasn’t very good sobriety.
(27:41 – 27:53)
If it had been good sobriety, she would still have had it. She wouldn’t have lost it. And so
she used to harp on that, and I learned a great deal from listening to her.
(27:55 – 28:15)
I think that’s a good thing to remember, that it’s the quality of your sobriety that counts.
My goal began to get higher. My goal now had to do with the quality of my sobriety
rather than with just having it, or even with just keeping it.
(28:17 – 28:57)
I began to learn why it was that we had 12 sips. I’m going to skip over here, rather than
being technological, and talk about some phrases that I learned last year in Texas that
explained a lot to me, and they’re rather fun, too. When I was there last year at one of
the groups where I spent quite some time and was around the club a lot, I heard them
talking and kidding and needling people, calling them one-peppers and two-peppers.
(28:59 – 29:16)
And I didn’t know what they meant by that, and I asked them. And they said, well, it
seems to us that we get quite a lot of people in here who take the first step. They admit
that they’re alcoholics and that their lives have become unmanageable, and they stop
drinking.
(29:18 – 29:26)
And then they sit down and take it pretty easy. They don’t do very much about AA. Oh,
they come around.
(29:26 – 29:37)
They like to see what’s going on. They’re rather like armchair strategists during the war.
They talk a wonderful game.
(29:39 – 30:01)
They can tell everybody else what’s wrong with the group and what’s wrong with them
and how it could and should be done better, but they don’t do a damn thing about it
themselves. They sit and supervise and get other people to do it. We call them onepeppers.
(30:03 – 30:29)
And then they said, we have another group of people that come in, and they take that
first step and they stop drinking, and then they take a flying leap from one to twelve.
They get terribly busy working with other alcoholics. They run all over town all day and
all night.
(30:32 – 30:39)
They gather them in in droves. And it’s true, they do a lot. They do a lot of good.
(30:39 – 30:49)
They bring in a lot of people. But you know, a funny thing happens. They bring those
people in, and then you never see them together anymore.
(30:49 – 31:05)
The people they bring in move on and get somebody else to learn about AA from
because that guy doesn’t know what to tell them. All he is is a signpost. He has directed
them into the door.
(31:06 – 31:18)
Once they get in, they don’t need the signpost anymore. It doesn’t tell them any more
than where AA is. It doesn’t tell them what it is or how it works or how they can work it.
(31:21 – 31:46)
And those are the people we call two-steppers. The only ones they can work with are the
brand-new ones because the brand-new ones know nothing, so they know a little bit
more than that. But they have completely forgotten that there are ten steps in between
one and twelve, two through eleven.
(31:48 – 32:07)
They haven’t done any work on themselves. That’s what those little steps are. Those
little steps are the tools that we are given with which we can fashion a better self.
(32:11 – 32:19)
Once we use it, we will. If we’ll use it. I didn’t learn that all at once.
(32:20 – 32:34)
But I began to learn it bit by bit the hard way. Each time I had difficulty, I learned a little
more, and I wouldn’t recommend it as a way of learning. I wouldn’t wish it on my worst
enemy.
(32:36 – 32:52)
Plenty of people are able to learn those lessons without beating their brains out against
that same old stone wall. I wasn’t. Well, I was very interested in those two phrases.
(32:52 – 33:02)
I discovered what they were doing about it in that Texas group. They coined those two.
They made them not too derogatory, but a little bit.
(33:03 – 33:15)
And they laughed about it, and they joked about it, and they needled each other about
were you a one-stepper or a two-stepper or maybe a three- or a four-stepper. They
carried it all the way through. They had a lot of fun with it.
(33:16 – 33:30)
And boy, they had a good group. I didn’t actually see many one-steppers or two-steppers
in that group. I don’t think anybody could have had the nerve to say that way, the way
they handled it.
(33:33 – 33:44)
They laughed them out of it. They ridiculed them out of it in the most friendly and
affectionate manner. I thought that was awfully healthy.
(33:45 – 34:02)
And it explained something to me that I had sort of felt but hadn’t really known how to
say for a long time. In the light of that, I began looking back at my own struggles.
They’re still going on, I can assure you.
(34:03 – 34:18)
I learned in the beginning you never graduate from AA and there was never a truer word
spoken. You go on struggling with it all the time. I don’t mean struggling with a desire to
take a drink all the time.
(34:18 – 34:35)
That you do leave behind. But this is really a mouthful we’ve bitten off, this AA program.
And if you really get your teeth into it and begin to chew, I think you’re going to keep
right on doing it till you die.
(34:35 – 34:58)
I know I am. I began to work as time went on at some of the other steps besides the first
and the twelfth and to gain a little more insight into myself through that. And I found that
they were learning steps for me.
(34:59 – 35:17)
I found that as time went along, if I really worked at them, I did learn. I learned enough
so that my goals began to change. That first goal of sobriety began to look like a fairly
easy goal.
(35:17 – 35:32)
I was approaching it, approaching some confidence that I might maintain it, that I might
have found a real way to maintain it. And I saw that that wasn’t my goal. My goal was
still way up there.
(35:35 – 35:49)
It was a goal about certain things in myself that I wanted to have different. I heard a man
in New York describe it one night. He was from Jersey, but he was speaking in the Bronx.
(35:50 – 36:04)
And he was talking about what had happened to him about a year and a half after he got
an AA. He’d been a real bum for a number of years. Before that, he’d been a man of
consequence, and he’d suffered from being a bum.
(36:05 – 36:29)
And he’d been that way long enough, sleeping on park benches and in flop houses, so
that he had rubbed pretty much of the newness and glamor and excitement off of life.
And he didn’t find it again, he said, when he first stayed sober. But after about a year
and a half, he said something began to happen to him.
(36:30 – 36:51)
He felt reawakening in him the ideals of his boyhood. He remembered some of the things
he had wanted to do and to be as a person. And those ideals emerged in him again as
bright and shining as they had been when he was 17 or 18.
(36:52 – 37:12)
And he saw that at last he had found a way in which he might conceivably achieve some
of them. And at the age of 45 or 6, he began really working toward the ideals he’d had
when he was a boy of 17. About himself.
(37:13 – 37:21)
About what kind of a man he’d be. What kind of a human being he’d be. What kind of a
citizen he’d be.
(37:23 – 37:33)
He’d been working at it five or six years and he’s a pretty swell guy. And he says he’s still
working. Well, those are the kind of goals that I began to discover.
(37:34 – 37:52)
I didn’t describe them that way, I don’t know that I described them at all. But they were
goals about myself. And I suppose if I look back, I find that it was pretty much the same
as that man I was telling you about.
(37:58 – 38:16)
I began to rediscover the things I had once dreamed of being. I began to rediscover them
as ideals I still wanted for mine. And I began to reach toward those goals.
(38:17 – 38:30)
And they were simple things at first. They seemed pretty unattainable and pretty
unreachable. But they were simple and they were simple enough so that I began to
approach a little bit toward them.
(38:30 – 38:46)
And every time I got fairly near a goal, I discovered that there was another one behind it.
That, to me, is growth. And growth is my personal interpretation of AA.
(38:49 – 39:07)
That is why, for me, it is such an exciting thing. It’s just as exciting to me today as it was
the first day I discovered it. And if I keep on feeling that way about it, and if I keep on
struggling to grow, I don’t see how it can ever become less exciting.
(39:08 – 39:14)
Growth is an exciting process. It’s never the same. It isn’t even.
(39:16 – 39:35)
It involves a great deal of striving and a great deal of effort and a great deal of struggle.
But it also involves a sense of achievement, as you begin to see a little bit of result here
and there. And that sense of achievement is a very fine satisfaction.
(39:38 – 39:55)
And also, as you begin to grow, you find that you are able to give. You’re able to share
some of the excitement that you’re finding in growing with other people who are trying
to do the same thing. We often say we talk the same language.
(39:57 – 40:09)
It’s easy to find people in any group who are struggling along the same road you are.
You’re thinking the same thoughts almost. You can finish each other’s sentences.
(40:10 – 40:27)
Of course, that was the first thing I found in AA itself, not the book, but in the group, that
meant so much to me. I’d always been one of those people that felt a stranger in groups
and in crowds. I never felt I belonged.
(40:28 – 40:38)
All my life, I’d had that problem. I always was on the outside looking in. Alcohol solved
that problem for me to a certain extent.
(40:38 – 40:53)
It made me feel a part of the group. It made me able to participate and to feel at ease.
But when I didn’t have it, or when I was using too much of it, it didn’t work, of course.
(40:56 – 41:10)
And the result was that when I first read the book in AA, I wasn’t a bit anxious to go and
meet the people. I didn’t want to get into this group of people. I was afraid that once
again I’d be on the outside looking in.
(41:12 – 41:24)
Well, finally, my doctor forced me down there, not at the end of a whiff, but his
messages were good enough. I got there. And I walked into a room full of people.
(41:24 – 41:34)
Well, it seemed to me there were an awful lot, probably all of 40. It looked like a mob to
me. And I ducked upstairs to leave my coat and didn’t come down.
(41:35 – 41:53)
So somebody came up and got me. And I went down, shaking in my boot. And in the first
few minutes, about six people had fired the same question at me, when did you have
your last drink? To my amazement, I told them the truth.
(41:57 – 42:07)
Without even thinking twice about it. I’d never done that before. And then I found myself
talking to them.
(42:07 – 42:16)
They were all men, all the AAs. There weren’t any women there. There weren’t any
women in the group for me to talk to.
(42:17 – 42:29)
And I found in a very few minutes, just that thing I said before, they could finish my
sentences. They knew exactly what I was thinking. And how I was thinking and why.
(42:30 – 42:40)
And that had never happened to me before in my whole life. Not with any group of
people. And I suddenly realized that I’d come home.
(42:41 – 42:48)
I belonged. These were my people. They talked my language.
(42:50 – 43:01)
They understood me and I understood them. And I think that was one of the most
wonderful feelings I have ever had in my life. Incidentally, I’ve never lost it.
(43:02 – 43:17)
I get it again whenever I go into a new group. Because I can go into a town not knowing
a soul. And very often some of the AAs meet me at the station and by the time we get to
the nearest coffee counter, we’ve been friends for 20 years.
(43:18 – 43:30)
You know how it is. By the time we’ve had three coffee, three cups of coffee, we were
practically born twins. I love that.
(43:30 – 43:49)
To me that’s terribly important. After that first meeting, there was a man up at the
sanitarium that I’d passed the book on to and he had accepted it with less argument
than I had, incidentally. I fought it for a month.
(43:52 – 44:00)
And when I was made to go to this meeting, I wanted company. What I wanted was
moral support. And I tried to persuade him to go with me, but he wouldn’t.
(44:01 – 44:20)
He said, you go see what it’s like and if it’s all right, I’ll go next week. Well, we didn’t
have the same doctor and his doctor didn’t force him, so I had to go alone. But he was so
curious that he called me very early the next morning from the sanitarium and he said,
how was it? What was it like? And I was at a loss to describe it.
(44:20 – 44:32)
And I could only say a few words. I said, Granny, we’re not alone anymore. That was the
first big meaning that I found.
(44:32 – 44:47)
The first tremendous help and relief and relief and happiness that I found through AA.
That is a very important part of AA. That is our fellowship.
(44:49 – 45:09)
That is the strength we give each other. The understanding and the friendship and the
kindness and the sympathy that we give each other, especially when we’re new and
struggling. The welcome that a new person usually gets when they come in.
(45:10 – 45:27)
The being made to feel wanted and on an equal with everyone in there. I heard
somebody describe that wonderfully. He was talking to a new prospect who was drinking
and the man who was drinking looked at the AA.
(45:28 – 45:42)
You can imagine the difference in their appearance. And he said, oh, I could never be like
you. And the AA looked at him and he said, listen, brother, there’s only one difference
between us and it’s one drink.
(45:43 – 45:53)
If you don’t take it, you’ll be like me. If I do take it, I’ll be like you. He meant that.
(45:55 – 46:12)
That makes for a feeling of great equality between new people and older people. We
don’t have grades or hierarchies in AA. Because somebody’s been sober four years, he
doesn’t refuse to talk to a guy that’s only been sober four days.
(46:13 – 46:24)
That isn’t our way. And that feeling is terribly important to new people because for a long
while they haven’t been the equal of anything. Not even a snake.
(46:26 – 46:40)
And suddenly they’re the equal of other human beings who look quite well. Who are
fairly well dressed and prosperous looking. Not sterile and bummed as they’ve been
made to feel they ought to be even if they aren’t.
(46:44 – 46:54)
I don’t want to minimize that fellowship at all. I think it is vital. I think it is a vitally
important part of the whole thing that we have.
(46:56 – 47:06)
But I don’t think it is AA. This is my interpretation, remember. I don’t think the fellowship
is AA.
(47:07 – 47:22)
I don’t think individuals, I don’t care who they are, are AA. I don’t think clubs are AA. Not
buildings, nor rooms, nor societies that run clubs.
(47:25 – 47:38)
All of those are parts of AA. But AA would go on without any of them. For me, AA is a way
of thinking.
(47:40 – 48:16)
A way of living. And believing that, I also believe, and I know it’s happening, that any one
of us could go anywhere into the middle of the Gobi Desert where there wasn’t a human
being around and we’d still have AA because it’s in here. It doesn’t depend on individuals
or a clubhouse or me.
(48:17 – 48:33)
Important as those may be, they are important. They’re particularly important on the
way in when we’re still trying to learn this design for living. This way of thinking.
(48:34 – 48:56)
This new attitude toward life, if you like. Without all those things, we might never
achieve it. Although we have all over the country AA members who started all by
themselves with a book and got sober and stayed sober long enough to get a group
started.
(48:59 – 49:12)
And some of them, I’ve met some men who were sober all alone for, well, I know, two.
Eleven months, each of them. One in Montreal, one in Shreveport, Louisiana.
(49:14 – 49:27)
And with the aid of the book and an effort to help other people which didn’t come to
anything during those eleven months, those men stayed sober. They didn’t have a
fellowship. They didn’t have a club.
(49:28 – 49:36)
They didn’t have meetings to go to. But they had AA in here. And they stayed sober.
(49:36 – 49:44)
And they grew. All by themselves. That, I think, is terribly important.
(49:46 – 50:16)
It means that although we might get stranded in some town where we couldn’t find an
AA group, or we might be someplace where there isn’t one, though I don’t think there are
many such in the United States anymore, that even though that might happen, we still
have it with us. Or we can have, if we want to. Because that’s what AA can be to us.
(50:17 – 50:23)
I’m not saying it always is. We don’t all get it. In that sense.
(50:23 – 50:33)
Right away. And some of us don’t get it for a long while. But if we don’t get it that way
sooner or later, we sure haven’t got value for our money.
(50:35 – 50:49)
We’ve been handed a package full of goodies, and we’ve taken out one little cheap
penny candy. Let the rest of the package go by. Because all of that is there in the
program.
(50:50 – 50:58)
If we’ll take it. But we’ve got to take it. We used to have a description of AA.
(50:59 – 51:03)
A good many years ago. I haven’t heard it used in a long while. We used to call it a
cafeteria.
(51:05 – 51:21)
And we said that the counter of that cafeteria was absolutely loaded with the most
wonderful food in the world. But it was strictly self-service. You could starve in that
restaurant if you waited for somebody else to serve you.
(51:21 – 51:41)
You could starve in the midst of plenty. And that’s precisely what happens to those of us
who don’t make use of what we’ve been freely given. Our twelve steps in AA.
(51:43 – 51:59)
I don’t know how anyone can miss that. Because I’m quite sure that if AA could have
been set up in two steps, it would have been done. I don’t think anybody wanted to spin
it out into twelve just to see more writing on a piece of paper.
(52:01 – 52:21)
I think twelve steps were put down because each and every one of them was vitally
important. And I think if we use each and every one of them, we’ll grow. And growth is
both happiness and intense satisfaction.
(52:22 – 52:46)
And not only that, growth makes us increasingly useful people. And I believe that most
alcoholics have always wanted to be useful people. I think maybe one of their troubles in
the past was that they couldn’t find a way to be useful that was right for them or suitable
for them.
(52:46 – 52:56)
They didn’t know how. And they were frustrated in that. And when they got into AA, they
suddenly discovered they were extremely useful people.
(52:58 – 53:32)
We have something we can give that most people haven’t got. And there are nearly
three million people looking for it, waiting for it, needing it desperately. I sometimes say
that while we’re laymen, most of us, and not technically trained in some senses, that
actually we are graduates of the most difficult school of training that anybody’s ever
gone through.
(53:32 – 53:44)
And furthermore, most of us have our master’s degree in it. And we work darn hard to
get it, too. We suffered to get it.
(53:47 – 54:06)
On that subject, we know plenty. We don’t know everything. Other people know other
angles of it better than we do.
(54:07 – 54:14)
But we know plenty. We know enough to be very useful. We know enough to help other
people.
(54:15 – 54:37)
And there isn’t anything more useful in the world. Well, those are the things, growth and
growing usefulness, that for me have meant satisfaction and happiness. That’s what
most people are looking for.
(54:39 – 54:56)
Most people don’t seem to find it. I’ve heard many people say in AA, and I echo it
heartily, I’m glad I’m an alcoholic. Since I found Alcoholics Anonymous, I wouldn’t have
been glad otherwise.
(54:57 – 55:10)
And quite frankly, I happen to have met a great many people who got well by other
methods. Can happen, you know. Alcoholics who stopped drinking.
(55:12 – 55:32)
I wouldn’t trade places with any of them. I don’t believe they got the satisfaction out of
their lives that most of us are getting or at least can get if we want to. I don’t mean
they’re all miserable and unhappy, like one guy I might tell you about.
(55:33 – 55:43)
They’re not. Some of them are perfectly contented and leading very comfortable, normal
lives. But for my money, I like my way best.
(55:45 – 55:53)
Our way. I was going to tell you about this guy. He told a story at a meeting.
(55:54 – 56:08)
He was the son of a doctor and a terrific alcoholic, and his father had sent him for
treatment to a very well-known place with good treatment. And it worked. He stayed
sober for 18 months.
(56:10 – 56:26)
But he said the only difference between himself sober and himself drunk during those 18
months was that his wife knew where he was. He was just as irritable as he’d ever been.
He was just as arrogant as he had ever been.
(56:27 – 56:41)
Just as self-centered and just as hard to get along with. And in short, he was perfectly
miserable. And at the end of 18 months, he took a good look at the balance sheet and he
said, I don’t see the profit in it.
(56:41 – 56:50)
And he went out and got drunk. Well, that time he stayed drunk two or three years. And
then AA came to town.
(56:51 – 57:06)
And the man that came to that town to start AA didn’t know how to begin and he called
on a couple of doctors and one of them was this boy’s father. Well, that doctor was
deeply interested in helping AA get started. And he did.
(57:06 – 57:21)
They consider him practically one of the founders now. He tried to get the boy to go to
some of these meetings in the early days and the boy was reluctant. He said he’d tried it
once and he didn’t see much percentage in it and why should he try some other way?
That might work.
(57:29 – 57:51)
He’d been miserable while it did. But anyway, the father did succeed in persuading him
and he finally went. And after he had been to two or three meetings, the first was
enough to make him want to go again, he said he realized there was something very
different in this than in the kind of sobriety he’d had before.
(57:52 – 58:15)
Because these people, he could see, were getting something out of it that he hadn’t had.
They seemed to be enjoying themselves for one thing, which he couldn’t understand,
they seemed to be happy. I suppose if he thought of it, he didn’t, he might have said,
some of them seemed to have a serenity that he liked to look at.
(58:18 – 58:39)
That’s a pretty good answer in my mind to the difference between some ways of getting
sober and our way of getting sober. But why do you suppose that difference is? Maybe
this isn’t the answer, but it’s what I think the answer is. It’s because AA is not just a
means of getting sober at all.
(58:41 – 58:57)
All that sobriety is for us is the door by which we enter the AA way of life. I don’t believe
anybody could successfully follow those 12 steps while drinking. Not any alcoholic,
anybody.
(58:59 – 59:32)
And essential to working out those 12 steps is to be sober. So we’ve got to be sober if
we’re going to even attempt to work AA. But if we walked in the door and didn’t do
anything about the 12 steps, what would we have? Sobriety? Of a sort, yes.
(59:33 – 59:43)
If we could keep it, yes. I don’t think it’d be worth very much. It isn’t the thing I’m looking
for.
(59:44 – 59:54)
I don’t think it’s the thing that most of us are looking for. We’re looking for a lot more
than that out of life. And we can get it.
(59:55 – 1:00:12)
It’s right here for us. We’ve been handed the tools with which we can get it, if we’ll pick
them up and use them. We’ve been told in a sort of condensation of those steps that
we’ve got to have honesty.
(1:00:14 – 1:00:22)
Self-honesty. That we’ve got to have humility. That’s a hard nut for most of us to crack.
(1:00:23 – 1:00:33)
It was awfully hard for me, and I’m still struggling. We’ve got to have tolerance. And that
means real tolerance.
(1:00:35 – 1:00:57)
Honestly thinking of the other fellow first, and trying not to do anything to hurt him.
Honestly granting the other fellow the right to his own opinion, even if you don’t agree
with it. Honestly granting to any other fellow or girl of any type or description the same
chance to get well that you have.
(1:01:02 – 1:01:15)
Honestly looking at each other. All in different stages of growth, in different stages of
getting well, with tolerance. And giving ourselves a little too.
(1:01:16 – 1:01:24)
We often don’t. I expect a lot of you out here have read Peace of Mind. It’s gone through
A.A. like a dose of salt back east.
(1:01:25 – 1:01:39)
Everybody’s read it. Good deal of talk in there about forgiving yourself. And I thought it
was very apt because if you forgive yourself it’s a lot easier to forgive other people.
(1:01:41 – 1:01:53)
Well that’s part of our program. That’s part of tolerance, honesty, humility, and love.
That’s where I flipped up.
(1:01:56 – 1:02:11)
I didn’t know it but I had. All my life I had sat up and figured that if people gave me so
much I’d dole out just that much. Not a speck more.
(1:02:12 – 1:02:23)
I wasn’t going to be caught short. And I didn’t realize that. But after I had had my first flip
and it was a Lulu.
(1:02:24 – 1:02:32)
It was a real one. Lois Wilson, Bill’s wife, came in to me late one night when I couldn’t
sleep. I was still awfully sick.
(1:02:33 – 1:02:45)
It took me a long while to come out of it. And she put her arms around me and she had
tears in her eyes and she said, Oh Marty, I wish you could get a little love in your heart.
And I couldn’t understand what she was talking about.
(1:02:46 – 1:03:03)
Good Lord, me get love in my heart? I needed it from other people. And I was so beaten
up in such a sad sack that I didn’t know why they shouldn’t give it to me. At that point,
my self-pity was colossal.
(1:03:06 – 1:03:23)
And I puzzled over that all the rest of the night and for many days afterwards. And it was
the beginning of a little illumination in a very dark corner of my mind and heart. And I
suddenly realized what I had been doing.
(1:03:25 – 1:03:38)
As far back as I could look, I had been measuring out my love for other people with
coffee spoons. Little drops. In exact proportion as to what I thought they were giving me.
(1:03:40 – 1:04:03)
Counting my returns before I handed any out. And it suddenly occurred to me that that
was all baffling. But one of the things that goes through and through the New Testament
and goes through and through our Twelve Steps was the idea that you gave freely
regardless of what you got back.
(1:04:05 – 1:04:26)
That it was indeed more blessed to give than to receive. And that the greatest
satisfaction you could get was from giving, not from getting it back. And I decided to
trust.
(1:04:27 – 1:04:40)
In other words, to trust. Well, it began to work right away, to my amazement. People
seemed to like me a lot better than they had.
(1:04:40 – 1:04:55)
Wasn’t that funny? I got along with them better. I made more friends and I was infinitely
happy. Well, you can take all those four things of which our program is made up.
(1:04:56 – 1:05:04)
Honesty, humility, tolerance, love. They all require faith. That doesn’t even need
mentioning.
(1:05:05 – 1:05:18)
You can’t do any of them without faith. And it looks to me like we’ve got one of the finest
philosophies of living ever devised for men. It’s pretty good.
(1:05:20 – 1:05:32)
Those of us who have been trying to live by it, and incidentally, that’s about as far, I
guess, as you ever get. In nearly eight years, that’s as far as I’ve got. I’m trying to live by
it.
(1:05:32 – 1:05:46)
I don’t always succeed by a long shot and no one knows it better than I. And I have to
keep trying and retrying on the same things over and over again. We don’t learn easily.
And I don’t think that’s just us.
(1:05:46 – 1:06:07)
I think that’s people. But curiously enough, trying seems to do a tremendous amount.
Someone else I heard say after more than two years of sobriety that he still thought
those twelve steps were the largest order that anybody had ever been given.
(1:06:07 – 1:06:20)
And he didn’t expect he’d ever be able to fill that order, but he stayed sober better than
two years just trying. Well, I think that’s what we do mostly. We keep trying.
(1:06:20 – 1:06:31)
We keep attempting. And it goes better sometimes and worse others. There’s something
that bothered me in the beginning and I know it bothered a lot of other people.
(1:06:33 – 1:06:43)
And I’ve talked about it and people have said it helped. That’s the learning graph. I
thought I might mention it tonight.
(1:06:44 – 1:06:55)
In teaching, it has been found that people learn in certain ways. Pretty regular. Children
do and adults too when they’re taking up something new.
(1:06:56 – 1:07:04)
When they first approach something new they learn very fast for a short time. And the
graph goes right up like that. Very sharp and quite high.
(1:07:05 – 1:07:13)
And then they hit a flat place. They call it a plateau. And that flat place is kind of difficult.
(1:07:13 – 1:07:17)
Especially for us. We’re so impatient. We’ve got to do it all right away now.
(1:07:19 – 1:07:28)
And on that flat place a lot of us get discouraged. We think nothing’s happening. We’re
not going anywhere.
(1:07:28 – 1:07:37)
What’s this all about anyway? And I think some people have difficulty over that. They’re
clipped. They get so discouraged.
(1:07:39 – 1:07:51)
Well on the learning graph that plateau is described as a period of consolidation of gains.
You’ve gone too fast on that upward spurt really. You couldn’t possibly assimilate all that
you’ve taken in.
(1:07:52 – 1:08:05)
It’s on the surface. And you need time in which that can all be sorted out and put away
inside of you so that you can use it. And the flat space is when that’s all happening.
(1:08:06 – 1:08:17)
You’re consolidating your gains. And once that’s been done you start up again. It’s never
quite as sharp and never quite as high as the first time.
(1:08:17 – 1:08:21)
It’s more gradual. But it’s up. And you have another flat space.
(1:08:21 – 1:08:33)
And that’s the way learning goes. Always. That’s been a big help to me because when I
hit flat places I’m thoroughly discouraged usually.
(1:08:34 – 1:08:49)
I’m very impatient. That first meeting I went to when most of the others went home a
few of us stayed and I was firing questions a mile a minute. I’d read the book about ten
times and knew whole pages by heart and I had a million questions.
(1:08:50 – 1:09:03)
Most new people do. And I was firing them at Bill as fast as I could and he was answering
them at great length but by about 3.30 in the morning he was getting a little tired I
think. I was still full of questions.
(1:09:03 – 1:09:18)
I’d have gone on for days. So finally he looked over at me and he said very quietly you
know Marty you don’t have to do it all by Thursday. That’s always helped me too.
(1:09:19 – 1:09:28)
This was Tuesday night and I certainly was trying to do it all by Thursday. Well I still have
that tendency. I want to do everything by Thursday.
(1:09:29 – 1:09:42)
I want to get all the three million alcoholics well by Thursday too. Never will succeed at
that because more are cropping up all the time. We’ll never run out of prospects either
don’t you worry about that.
(1:09:47 – 1:10:22)
But those things about us our impatience and our fears and our worries that maybe this
isn’t doing enough for us we’ve got to learn to understand those and to live with them.
We don’t need to be impatient. If we understand what those flat apparently flat periods
are we’ll come through them with flying colors because there’s one thing sure nothing
really stands still.
(1:10:23 – 1:11:02)
We’re moving along on that flat place it’s just not the excitement of shooting up but
we’re moving along and that’s something to bear in mind about growth too. If we’re not
growing if we’re not moving forward we’re going to go backwards because nothing in
nature stands still including man and I think it’s pretty wise for us to keep on trying to go
forward in view of what we know about what happens to us when we go in the other
direction. We know what happens to us when we stop trying.
(1:11:03 – 1:11:17)
We know what happens to us if we don’t stick to our programs. We’re very fortunate
people. We have red flags that pop up when we get off the track.
(1:11:19 – 1:11:39)
The red flag of getting near to taking a drink or even taking it. We’ve got something that
keeps us going that prevents our dropping this thing and deciding it isn’t all worth it
anyway. We can’t do that with impunity.
(1:11:40 – 1:12:00)
I don’t mean for a minute that we all have to remain as active as we are when we first
come in. That wouldn’t be natural either. What happens to us in AA is not so difficult to
understand if you really think of it as an illness and that’s what our book tells us it is and
that’s what the scientists agree that it is.
(1:12:01 – 1:12:10)
We make a mistake a lot of us I think. I made it too. We forget how long it took us to get
that sick.
(1:12:12 – 1:12:32)
Very few of us arrived at the point where we wanted AA after our first night of drinking.
We spent a good many years getting to that point and we all know that this is
progressive. That we got worse and worse and worse as time went on.
(1:12:34 – 1:12:46)
And by the time most of us arrived here we were pretty sick. We had a very serious
illness. In Bill’s terms which he uses frequently, a mortal disease.
(1:12:49 – 1:13:06)
And yet some of us expect having spent years arriving at that point that we’ll just walk in
a door with two A’s on it and bingo we’re perfectly well. Absolutely normal people again.
Just like anybody else.
(1:13:07 – 1:13:18)
It isn’t like that. If it were like that we wouldn’t need twelve steps. All we’d need is the
knowledge that we were sick.
(1:13:19 – 1:13:29)
And we have to stop drinking. We’d do it and that would be that. We need our programs
in whole because we were so sick.
(1:13:30 – 1:13:46)
And because having been that sick it’s going to take us a long time to get well. Think
back to that definition in our big book that I mentioned earlier. An obsession of the mind
coupled with an allergy of the body.
(1:13:46 – 1:13:52)
All we’re dealing with in here is the obsession of the mind. We don’t do any medical
work. We wouldn’t know what to do if we did.
(1:13:52 – 1:14:03)
They don’t. Nobody knows what that allergy is. If allergy is the right word which many
people think it isn’t.
(1:14:03 – 1:14:09)
But it’s descriptive enough for us. It serves a purpose. But think about an obsession.
(1:14:10 – 1:14:19)
That powerful thing called an obsession. You don’t throw that off like an old coat. You
have to work to get rid of it.
(1:14:20 – 1:14:38)
And what is it really that we do? In most cases we substitute another obsession for the
destructive one. We have an obsession to drink. In order to overcome that we substitute
an obsession for AA.
(1:14:40 – 1:14:58)
Pretty healthy substitution because AA is constructive and the other is destructive. But it
drives some families crazy. They don’t understand why that’s so necessary.
(1:14:59 – 1:15:16)
They share the general belief that if we stop drinking, bingo, we’re perfectly well. That
you just flip your fingers at an obsession and it’s gone. Obviously it’s not so.
(1:15:16 – 1:15:40)
Our experience shows it. When we come in we are just as obsessed with AA for quite
some time as we were with drinking. Almost all of us were very obsessed with it.
(1:15:40 – 1:15:48)
We dive into it head first. Those of us I’m talking about that really want it and really work
at it and make a success of it. Stay with it.
(1:15:50 – 1:16:15)
And we’re up to our neck in it and up to our ears in it and it is replacing the obsession to
drink. But as time goes by, a year, two, three, we get over that first intense need. The
obsession is beginning to be broken and we don’t have to bury ourselves quite so
completely.
(1:16:16 – 1:16:31)
We’re perhaps a little more thoughtful of our families. Stay home once in a while instead
of always being out on an AA call every night and week. I’m thinking now of what some
husbands and wives have written to me about when I’ve been around.
(1:16:32 – 1:16:45)
You know when you travel around in this business you’re just a walking complaint
bureau. Everybody wants to tell you all of the problems and difficulties and troubles. It’s
a wonder that I don’t get the stories and think the whole of AA is falling apart.
(1:16:45 – 1:17:08)
I know better. But what I hear are very often the problems and the difficulties and I’ve
heard an awful lot in the last year or so from the families who think that it’s just dreadful
that their husband or their wife as the case may be is spending so much time on AA after
having neglected the family for so many years. What good is this doing? They’re still
neglecting the family.
(1:17:13 – 1:17:24)
And I’ve tried to describe it to them in terms of tuberculosis. Largely because I had
tuberculosis. I had to live out here in southern California for four years getting over it
when I was a kid.
(1:17:26 – 1:17:36)
Well I spent some time in the beginning in the sanitarium. I had quite a bad case of it.
And during that time I was on the most rigid regime.
(1:17:37 – 1:17:41)
Had to eat every hour and had to be fed. I couldn’t even lift my arm. Oh the worst.
(1:17:42 – 1:17:51)
But after some months of that I began to show some improvement and I was allowed to
go home. I had a trained nurse. But I was in the recuperative stage.
(1:17:51 – 1:18:04)
I could get up a few hours in the afternoon. Still spent most of my time in bed for another
year. And then I’d improved again and as time went on the time up lengthened.
(1:18:05 – 1:18:22)
And in my second year I was up most of the time and just had to go to bed two or three
hours every afternoon. Well I was a kid. I was fourteen when this began and it’s hard for
a kid of that age to stick to anything as disciplined and regular as that.
(1:18:23 – 1:18:34)
And if it hadn’t been for the fact that my family understood perfectly well what had to be
done and saw that I did it. Kept me to that regime. I might not have made it.
(1:18:35 – 1:18:47)
I might not have got well. But they didn’t have any difficulty understanding that it was a
long term proposition. And that I was going to have to do certain things about it at
different stages of the game.
(1:18:49 – 1:19:11)
And that eventually I would arrive at a point where I could do almost everything I’d ever
done before but as long as I lived I would be an arrested case of tuberculosis. And as
long as I lived I would have to take certain precautions. Certain things that I ought to
watch out for and be careful about.
(1:19:12 – 1:19:19)
They understood that better than I did. They thought to us that I followed them. And I
learned it too as time went on.
(1:19:21 – 1:19:43)
They’ve got to be taught the same things about us and we’ve got to understand them
too. We’ve got to understand that we don’t get well one two three by walking into A.A.
That it’s a long term continuing process. And no one need be discouraged by that.
(1:19:43 – 1:19:56)
Because it’s fun all along the way. And I think we’ve got to learn now that we’re growing
older and all of our groups are getting older. We have many groups in the country now
that are five and six and seven years old.
(1:19:56 – 1:20:07)
And this is one of them. That among our older members many of them will not be quite
as active as they once were. And it’s natural.
(1:20:08 – 1:20:13)
They won’t lose touch altogether. I hope. If they do then we can worry about them.
(1:20:14 – 1:20:26)
But they won’t be in there with both feet rolled up working on new people. And right in
the middle all the time and always around and always available. And they shouldn’t be
anyway.
(1:20:27 – 1:20:37)
Because that kind of thing is terribly good for new people. They need it. And the older
members don’t need it so much.
(1:20:39 – 1:20:53)
Always in every group we’ll find that there are a few who do it that way always because
they want. And that’s their privilege. But I don’t think we need to worry so much.
(1:20:53 – 1:21:10)
Nobody’s asked me about this here but I’ve been asked it practically every place else
I’ve been so I’m answering it first. We don’t need to worry too much about the older
members who are not right in the middle of things every minute the way they used to
be. That’s part of recovery.
(1:21:11 – 1:21:31)
In the early days in New York when I first came in we used to stress a great deal the fact
that this was a program that was going to fit us for normal living. Was going to put us
back in the world as normal, useful, productive citizens. And I still think that’s what it’s
meant to be.
(1:21:33 – 1:21:43)
But I don’t think it does just that. I think it’s a program to make us better human beings.
Better men and women.
(1:21:43 – 1:21:49)
Better citizens than most other people ever get the chance to be. Thank you.