Tonight’s meeting topic came from the chair, who pulled it from the chapter The Family Afterwards, though really he was pointing us toward the three short sayings that show up at the end of that chapter and get repeated all through the rooms. First things first, easy does it, and live and let live. He kept it broad on purpose, just asked us what those phrases meant to us, or have any other phases stuck out to us like those did to him.
A lot of people shared on different phrases entirely, or different ways those phrases connected to them. When it came my turn, I took a more analytical angle. I said what I really like about phrases like these is that they’re bite sized chunks that sum up something much bigger.
I compared it to a starving man, someone who hasn’t eaten for days, who gets sat down in front of a huge banquet table. He’d be thrilled to see it, but there’s no way he’s eating it all in one sitting. That’s exactly what it felt like getting handed the Big Book early on. Someone hands you this thing and says, here, this says everything, read this. And at first it’s just too much to take in all at once.
Over time I started to realize these smaller phrases are a way in, a way to approach a bigger idea in pieces small enough to actually hold onto. And if you follow that logic out, it’s kind of the whole design of the program. The phrases sum up the principles, the principles sum up the steps, the steps are really just a portion of the book, and the book itself, stories and all, is trying to sum up the entire experience of what we go through as alcoholics, both the ones of us in the rooms and all the others still suffering who aren’t yet.
It’s the same idea as one day at a time. If you sit and try to think about quitting forever, what happens at a wedding, a holiday, whatever, you’re suddenly carrying your whole life in your head at once. Versus just, all I have to do is not drink today. If you come in overwhelmed and see a sign that says easy does it and you’re not sure what it means yet, you start turning it over, and your understanding grows a little at a time, the same way your sobriety grows one day at a time.
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