October 2021

Dear Reader

"Promptly admitted it" are the last words of the Tenth Step. Promptly in my dictionary includes; perform without delay, be ready to act or respond, to urge us to do something. In my head promptly means; don’t hang about, get a move on, do it now. This is a vital part of my recovery Programme, so vital that if I delay taking action then I may be putting my sobriety at risk. Therefore this is life and death stuff. Not complicated, often just doing the right thing in a timely way. Simple stuff like saying, "I’m sorry I did not need to say that." Or, "My apologies for being late." Other things I have discovered in my sobriety are I that I don’t need to add excuses in my amends as then I am trying to justify my wrong action. If I’m late then I probably should have set off earlier, I don’t need to describe the state of city centre traffic. Keep it simple they said, so best I follow that and do as suggested!

Taking my daily inventory also helps me to work the rest of my AA Programme. From my daily inventory I find myself asking questions of like, "Do I admit that I am powerless over alcohol today?" Being an alcoholic in recovery in AA I have been shown that there is a mental side to my illness. This reveals itself in many ways including when my head tells me, "Maybe you are ok today, maybe you are not an alcoholic, perhaps you were just going through a difficult time in your life when you kept drinking." Step Ten is for me the working Step that helps to keep this Alki on the sober path, trudging along. Trudging is good for me, it works, it really does!