Old Versus Young in AA
I hear a lot of older people who come into AA wishing they had come in earlier, but they had to tread their own path. I was 26, nearly 27, when I needed the Fellowship desperately for my rapidly spiralling, out-of-control life and drinking. There was a much older gentleman who came into our amazing Fellowship after he had retired. He would infuriate me as he always said this is such a simple Programme – he seemed to pick it up so easily whereas I was really struggling with it.
Everyone in the Fellowship back in the day seemed to be old, at least a lot older than me, and here I am one of those older peeps now. I eventually realised that the benefit of coming into AA later in life, especially if retired, is that you have done all those life things: the career and so-called normal people (who are anything but normal), and the marriages, the kids, the mortgage. I got married in sobriety, had three sons in sobriety, and after 16 years of marriage then went through 11 years of a terrible divorce.
I sometimes hear people say, “Do the next right thing and the next right thing will happen.” Maybe in a perfect world, but no matter how many times I do the next right thing, there is never any guarantee that anyone else will do the next right thing; I can only try to keep my side of the street clean. I have no control over people, places, things. Back then, having a wife, three kids, a cat, a dog, a mortgage, a career offshore I was still trying to develop, lots of courses and training to do – I was away for three weeks at a time and home for three weeks – I had a lot going on in my life the majority of the time, and I struggled. I was once doing the dishes at the old Friday night meeting in South Shields and this wonderful elder statesman said to me, “You know Keith, there is light at the end of the tunnel.” I said, “How long is this tunnel?”
Coming in AA young, I may have been 27 but I had not grown up, and I grew up in our amazing Fellowship. By comparison we have teenagers coming in now, people in their early twenties recognising the illness, which is great. Sometimes quickly, sometimes slowly, the Promises will always materialise if we work for them, the operative word being work for them.
We have to put action in; we have to change the one person we can – ourselves. We can have a Big Book, and lots of wonderful AA books out there, but if we do not read them and reread them, they may as well be door stops. Anyone can come to an AA meeting and spout AA talk and quotations from the Big Book; we can look the part and say the right things, but what are we like at home? What are we like at work? Is our Programme being used both inside and outside of AA, or just inside so we can get the nodding heads?
If we stay long enough, and try to practise these principles in all our affairs, but remembering we are not saints, we claim spiritual progression, not perfection. We cannot afford to fall into the trap that just because it seems too hard and even impossible, then we will procrastinate and just not bother.
Roundabout magazine to me is not just a good thing to have to read; it is a discipline, it is my meeting in-between meetings, forever reminding me of my daily reprieve from this illness dependent on my spiritual condition. If I am reading AA, I am at a meeting. If I am helping others in AA and talking to other members, I am making sure I know who I am, Keith the alcoholic. If I let the illness back in it will tell me that I no longer need meetings, that I will be fine. I haven’t drunk for years, but the illness is still doing press-ups in the background, just waiting for its chance, ever so patient, ever so cunning, baffling and powerful.
As a wonderful lady in the Fellowship says, am I controlling the illness or is the illness controlling me? The illness was there before I drank, it had a field day when I was drinking, and no matter how long I am sober, it will always be there. Today I have a choice: I will choose not to drink on a daily basis, as one day is all any of us have.
Love in Fellowship.
Oil Rig Keith Friday night literature meeting