October 2020 - Editorial

This month’s theme is ‘recovery’ – the First Legacy. When I was choosing the extracts for page 4 from AA literature, I started by thinking about my own journey and what it meant for me. I remember distinct moments in time when the ‘penny dropped’ – things shifted and I could notice and more importantly feel a difference in myself. The first time my head fell silent; the first time I could say I loved someone; the first time I felt safe in the outside world and the first time I finally had a belief in a Higher Power and actually believed it! All these things made life better for me and those around me. These moments are what I had in mind when looking for extracts to include in this issue.

I enjoyed looking in books I’d not visited for a while and although I didn’t use most of the passages I read, it was good for my own recovery to read them! The story of Bill W’s own spiritual awakening and how the room ‘lit up’, was something I always heard members mention in my own early days and along the way I’ve had my own experiences, where there was not necessarily big balls of light, but it was like someone turned the TV set to colour from black and white – another marker in my recovery to remember my progress.

My final flicking of pages took me to The Promises. I didn’t hear or read about them for a while in AA but when I did – Wowser! It was like someone had perfectly described my own drinking journey and the change that did and was yet to happen! My whole life had baffled me. I had struggled to navigate it as an adult and childhood had just been a maze of wrong turns. The Promises sum up for me the journey of recovery. I think as a newcomer they can seem like the impossible but once you are on that journey and those moments of change start to happen, it all begins to make sense.

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Contents

2 Sub-Committee Notice Board

3 Editorial

4 Extract From AA Literature

5 Article From The Roundabout Archives

6 Learning To Listen

8 Joining Up The Dots

10 Living Sober In Lockdown

i-iv AA Conference Approved Books

13 The Roundabout Interview

16 Keeping Up With My AA

17 In These Rooms

18 Recovery

19 He Restores My Soul

21 That Was The Week That Was

22 Submitting An Article To Roundabout

23 Subscribe To Roundabout