Jerry J. from Lake Withney, TX doing the steps at the Space Coast Roundup 2005 in Melbourne Beach, FL

So you get ready to make a decision. You get ready to live your life in something. You say, what I'm gonna do today, Is it pretty? That's love. Do something beautiful and kind.

Is it unselfish? What's it gonna do to the other guy? Is it the right thing to do? That's purity. That's purity.

And last of all, is this am I telling myself the truth? That's honesty. So if it passes all those tests, do it. If it turns out it was wrong, you've got a 10th step. You can clean it up tomorrow.

That's what we're looking at. Another great old a a r l h says, stop doing what you know is wrong and start doing what you know is right. Your life will improve. And that's kind of where we're going with this step. When I got here, this step bothered me a lot because I, you know, you can you can see it turned my I thought I was gonna have to go to China and be a missionary or some damn thing, you know.

I didn't wanna do this. This didn't look like my kind of deal. I'd already thought about this. But so far, I haven't had to go to China. And what I decided this meant to me, what this step meant to me was I believe that God's will for me is to live my life the way the steps of Alcoholics Anonymous dictate.

To process what happens in my life through those steps. To have the goals and the values that the steps give me. Those are the things that I believe are for me. And so when I made that decision that that's what I'm going to do, I believe that's when I took the 3rd step. And I have tried with varying degrees of success to process my life through the steps of Alcoholics Anonymous.

I forget it from time to time, like all of us do. I go back and, you know, I'm running the show again, again. But it never has worked. And even when it seems to work, oftentimes, there's a terrible price to pay to in what you do to other people. So as long as we're practicing the 4 absolutes, as long as we're trying to move for what we think God would have us be, life seems to go along pretty good.

Pretty good. We are we are dealing with spiritual values here. We are not we are letting the material take care of itself, and it seems to do that. At least it has in my life. I think that's what I wanna move into step 4 with.

When you make that kind of decision, step 4, which says that we, made a fearless and, searching a fearless moral inventory of ourselves. The lead into that step in the book says that, though our decision, step 3, was a vital one. Was a vital and crucial step. It could have little permanent effect unless at once, followed by a strenuous effort to face and be rid of the things in ourselves which have been blocking us. We had to get down to causes and conditions.

Blocking us from what? Three times, I believe, in that chapter, it refers to not being able to contact a power greater than ourselves. I think self centeredness blocks us from God. I think it's like c s Lewis said, there are 2 kinds of men. There's a kind that say to God, thy will be done.

And they're the kind that God says to them, thy will be done. And I'm a lot better off if I'm trying to do God's will than I am trying to do for him to tell me to try to work it on my own without his help. He's a perfect gentleman. I was using he in a generic not in a generic sense, but in a expansive sense. I don't take don't know whether God's man, woman, or both.

That that hadn't become real important to me so far. And if it is to you, I apologize, and I I'll try not to do that anymore. Here's where we get here's where we find our old ideas. First thing I've they told me about this step was I didn't I didn't need it. I didn't need to do this.

I'd sent my wife to a psychiatrist because she was obviously kind of hypercritical of drinking. He'd wanted to talk to me, and so I reluctantly discussed football and things like that with him. We didn't get too deep about that deep. And, I just really couldn't see any value to rehashing all this old crap that had gone on. I didn't all I really wanna do is quit drinking.

I didn't wanna change my life a lot. My sponsor didn't do one for quite a while. Another guy in my group hadn't done one for 19 years. That gave me a lot of sauce. He later on said that was the longest 19 years of his life.

I, I I tried to suppress all these things. I had things going on in my head that I'd try to suppress. I had favorite resentments. It was like I could sit in my green chair and get my bottle of whiskey, and I could go to my mind, and there was a whole rack of videos that I would play. And I'd plug them in, and I'd play this one, and then I would get to that point where I was offended or harmed in some way, and then I would take over.

And I would finish the show by what was gonna happen next time. I was gonna get him next time and how I was gonna get him. If there had been a black button that I could have pressed and gotten rid of all the Alonons, There would have been no Al Anon's before about 1974, about a year after I've been sober. I had all these things going on in my head and never ever thought about them at all as being negative. You know?

Did you ever have a good day thinking about a resentment? I didn't. I I really never did, but I spent a hell of a lot of my life dwelling on him. I could switch. I could do I could work on Al Anon for a while and I'd set it aside and I think somebody else, and I'd play that how I was gonna kill that guy or what it's gonna do to him or they'd beg for mercy.

And if I had enough crowd around me, I'd probably give him mercy. And they'd think what a what a wonderful man I was. You know? Socrates says that a a life without self examination is not worth living. And Emerson, Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote this little thing I wanna read you here now that I think is just really pretty special.

Says there's a time in the education of every man when he arrives at the conviction that envy is ignorance, that imitation is suicide, that he must take himself, for better or worse, as his portion, that though the universe is full of good, no kernel of nourishing corn can come to him but through his own toil, bestowed on the plot of ground which he was given to till. You're gonna have to accept who you are and recognize that's just exactly what you were supposed to have, And do your best in that in that plot of ground, and forget all this other stuff. There's another story. This was written by old Henry, I believe. I'm not absolutely sure of this, but it was about the old man who was the janitor at the mill.

This old fella worked at the mill for many years, and then one day the mill was sold. And we know how that happened is. I guess it was some some kind of consolidation or something taking place, but the mill was sold and the new management came in and said, no one will work here who does not have the ability to read and write. The old man couldn't read or write, so they put him out on the street. He had no way to make a living.

So he he started he had a little bit of money, and he started, going down to the train station. The train station ran through this little town, and he would buy a a carton of cigarettes. And his people were trying to get on the train to go somewhere in a hurry and wouldn't have time to buy their own cigarettes. He had sold them a pack of cigarettes at a little profit. First thing you know, he had a little box that he's carrying all kinds brands in.

First thing you know, he had a little stand. First thing you know, he opened up a stand down at the next station. And a friend of his, complimenting him on his success, he was doing very well, he said, what are you doing with all your money? He said, oh, I put it in a box under my bed. He said, you can't do that.

You can't leave your money in in your box, in your bed. You have somebody to steal it. He said, what should I do with it? He said, put it in a bank. He said, how would I do that?

He said, I'll show you. So the man took his box of money and went with his friend down to the banker, and the banker was real glad to see anybody with a box of money. Said, have a seat, and he counted the money and filled out a deposit slip and got the signature cards out and handed it to the old man. Said, now if you just give us your signature right there, we'll be all through and you'll have an account with this bank. And the old man said, I can't read or write.

And the banker said, you mean to tell me you've made all this money and you can't read or write? My gosh, he said. Think of how much think how well y'all offer you'd be if you if you could read or write. He said, oh, if I could read or write, I'd still be a janitor over here at the mill. So we don't know how good we are.

We don't know what we got, so we gotta look at this thing. We gotta process this data that all these lessons we haven't learned. And what we're gonna look for is three things. We're gonna look at the three most common forms of self centeredness, And they will encompass almost every negative event in our lives and they will have a lesson. Each one of those negative events will have a lesson for us that will keep us from having to repeat that experience again somewhere down the line if we pay attention.

We're gonna look for resentments. We're gonna look for fear, and we're gonna look at our relationships. And we start off with the columns. Now when I started off, I couldn't possibly understand the big book. It talked about those 4 columns.

I didn't know miss Smith. I didn't know miss Brown. I mean, this was way too complicated for me. And I started trying to I started collecting 4 step guides. I had a stack of them, you know, the and it was just almost impossible did and left it in the airport in Indianapolis, Indiana one time.

I, you know, and I don't think I some guy thinks I was some really strange guy passed through Indianapolis. I'm sure that I well, I had trouble deciding what kind of paper to use too, you know. You can't just write this on anything. Loose leaf? No.

Yellow pad that can tear the pages out easy. Spiral notebooks. That's why I got a spiral notebook. And then you got I mean, talk about what you're gonna write it with, what kind of pencil or pen. You you know, that's finally, I had to do what one of the gals in my group used to say, take pen in hand, put ass in chair, and write.

And I did it the way the book said. The first thing it tells us to do is make a grudge list. Is there anything anybody that came to Alcoholics Anonymous that didn't have some grudges? And is there anybody I could write pages on who what what was wrong with the world? And then they make us take off one of those people, institutions, or principals, and put it in column 1.

And then, we go to column 2, and we describe exactly the event that caused the the bad feeling. You know, you don't learn a damn thing if you say, do you resent my wife? What's she do? She doesn't understand me. Did you learn anything?

No, you didn't. But if I go further and say, well, I wanted to play poker with the boys and in front of all of them, she told me I couldn't play poker. It embarrassed the hell out of me. Well, now you've learned a little something, and so have I. Move over to the 3rd column, they say, what did what what why did that bother you?

And they give you 4 choices, ambition, self esteem, security, or relationships. My wife, client, showed I was impact. A wimp. Involved that involved my relationships as well. So I write those two words down and I got column 3.

And I keep doing that and I go along in every step of this way. Each one of these names, each one of these principles, each one of these institutions, I make those same deals. Maybe with my wife, it was probably more than one event, and possibly. And I make those I make a list and write them all down and I write down the how does that affect me in that 3rd column? And I reach a point down there where I I recognize, you know, these people have been controlling my life.

My reactions these folks have been dominating my whole life. And it gives me a prayer to say, and I say a prayer. And then I move over to column number 4, a column which most of us have never, certainly me, had never really looked at. That is, where was I at fault? Now I understand that you can be just as self centered feeling like everything is your fault and your name ought might ought to be on that that inventory list as as you can if you think you're a total victim and everybody else is at fault.

But most of us never got beyond blame. We didn't get any further over than blame and you don't learn a damn thing from life until you get past blame. When you get past blame and you get in that 4th column, you begin to understand what I what I contribute to this situation. Then your education truly begins and you begin to understand I began to understand what what my life was being dominated by. I finish that and I go to fear.

I wasn't afraid. I'm from West Texas. I'm a man. Man, West Texas men know no fear. Did you ever see a John Wayne movie where John Wayne said, I feel a little insecure today?

Hell no. But they told me they told me I had to do this damn inventory. And they told me these are the everybody has these three things, resentment, fear, and relationships. And yours are messed up somewhere in there. So I thought, well, you know, probably when I was a little kid, I knew some fear.

I'll start back there. Snakes. Do you like snakes? We may have some people here like them. I was taught not to like snakes because we had rattlesnakes, which are bad snakes, and we had other kind of snakes which are good snakes.

But a 3 year old kid can't tell the difference between a rattlesnake and a good snake. So I was told, you know, you see that thing on the ground there? That's a snake. He can hurt you. He can hurt you real bad.

So you wanna stay away from him. Then I was told to go outside and play. Did you ever notice snakes are hard to see in the grass? They blend right in. They don't move until you almost step on.

You're bare footed. Now you're gonna walk through that tall grass, bare footed. There's snakes, maybe snakes in there. Could hurt you. Can't see them.

You have a feeling in the pit of your stomach. That's fear. That's fear. Oh, Oh, I had that at other places. Oh, yeah.

I've had that feeling before. And you begin to write the things you fear, People finding out who you are. People talking about you. Afraid you will lose rather than win. Afraid afraid that what you have will be taken away from you.

Afraid that people won't like you, afraid you've said the wrong thing someplace. And you I found my life was shot full of fear. And I wrote about my fears. I didn't realize how much I was dominated by that which I could not control, that which I could not see until it was too late and I had to encounter it. It all worked just exactly like it did with that snake.

And I, I'm still afraid of snakes, But my grandson had a bullsnaker, and he was kind enough to let me hold him recently. Now I've got to either be a wimp or hold the damn snake. I held the damn snake. That's what I did. He didn't hurt me.

Funny how smooth and slick he was, Different than anything I'd ever thought. But it's I had to find out about that. Now, I didn't find it necessary to write about my sex relationships. At least initially, I didn't find it necessary. I was married, had 2 kids, so I knew something about what was going on there.

And, wasn't messing around any, so I didn't I didn't have it doing any point in writing about some of that old stuff. So I didn't write about it. Now I'm gonna skip over to the 5th step where it says that we admitted to God, to ourselves, and to another human being the exact nature of our wrongs. I had a sponsor. I did the 4 step because I was involved with a bunch of people who were pretty obsessed with this AA program.

You know, you could have a hangnail. They'd say, you got a hangnail? Yeah. You done a 4 step? Now, that wasn't inappropriate because I was cancer.

Then I'm standing in the doctor's office and say, see how red it is? Is there a cancer that a cancer of the cuticle that I could could be having? So I did the 4 step, but didn't really want to do a 5th step. The reason I was reluctant to do the 4th step was because I could read the 5th step. So I went to my sponsor one day, very unusual thing for me to do, and asked him.

I said, did you did you find it necessary to do a 4 step? He said, yeah. I said, did you find it necessary to do a 5th step? He said, of course, I found it necessary to do a 5th step. I said, tell me about that.

I'd like to know about doing 5th steps. He said, well, I did it with my sponsor. Said, didn't really amount to a lot, so he had my little book that I'd written it all down in. And I gave him my little book, and he thumbed it around there a little while. I looked at a little bit, and he said, did you write it all down?

I said, yep. And there's I could. And he said, well, okay. He said, threw it in the trash can. He said, that's your past.

That's all gone. We're gonna talk about going forward from here As a fiesta, I've got one of these analytical minds. I thought, you know, if he did that with his sponsor that way, So I said, would you do a 5th step with me? And he said, yeah. So I took my 2 thirds of my 5th step, and I went over.

And he said his, he saw me carry my little book. It was a red book. I I got my red book because I was hot hot item, and I I said, yes, sir. This is my 4 step. And he said, can I see it?

And I said, oh, yes, sir. And I handed it to him. I began to look over his desk and see where the trash can was because we're gonna need one in just a minute. And he said, well, Jerry, he said, do you wanna read this to me, or do you want me to read it to you? It's just like old Job in the Bible, that which I feared had come upon me.

So I said, you read it. And then for the next period of time, I stood up on the other side of the desk and would point out now this is a little overstated right here. We got through with that humiliating experience. And he walked around the desk and put his arms around me and said, I'm glad you did that. I'm glad you shared that with me.

I think you did the best you could. He didn't even say. You left out a 3rd. He just left it with that. And when I went to my next meeting of Alcoholics Anonymous, I walked in the door and looked around and thought, you have paid your dues, cowboy.

You belong here. And I started searching out people who had problems, and I asked them, have you done your 4th step? I started a 4 step meeting within a month after I had, done that. We we talked it over. And then the damn fools in that meeting began to ask me, what did you write about sex relations?

And I said, not much. And it was eating me up, so I wrote it in code. It was really a hot item, let me tell you. But, you know, there's no area of our life that's more self centered than our sexuality. We have messed up our sexuality about as much as any species could possibly do.

We've spent days weeks years worrying about how we did it, when we did it, how often we did it, who we did it with, did we have the right equipment, did we have enough of the right equipment. We told people. We didn't tell people. We hated it. We bragged about it.

We did all these things and wondered, did we cause any harm doing that? And our book gives us a series of questions to ask about that. Where have you aroused jealousy? They're in the book. Where have you harmed others with this thing?

What should you have done instead? The book recognizes that our sexuality and our it is a necessary part of our human existence. And that it's a natural instinct, and we're gonna have to deal with it. But the thing we wanna do is shape a sane and sober idea for how we're doing how we're gonna do this. And if we mess up somewhere along the line, we don't get drunk over it.

We go back and we start over, and we we finish it up. Now I had a third of an inventory that I hadn't taken. And here I am conducting a 4 step pass. Who would you suppose I could ask to do my fist step? My my sponsor had moved off to Jonesboro, Arkansas about that time, and I was in deep trouble.

I didn't know who I was gonna do it. And then some damn fool walked up one day to me and said, would you be my sponsor? I said, I'll have to call my sponsor. That's twice I've called him now, you know. So I called him and I said, do you think I could do you think I could sponsor somebody?

And he said, oh, hell yeah. Sure. You can give away what you've been given. Oh, boy. Uh-oh.

So, so Tommy and I began to go down the road, and he was a you know, I don't know where he came from. He came came from Canada. That's where he came from. We have some Canadians here. And they must be wound pretty tight up in Canada because he just started going through those damn steps.

I mean, it was ever ever day he had moved through to to a new place in the book, and he was going pretty fast, and he got through the 4th step, and he said, will you do a 5th step with me? I said, I don't know. I'll call my sponsor. So I called my sponsor. My sponsor said, yeah.

Go ahead. So we sat down, and I learned I learned the 5th step prayer. Do you know what it is? If you've done more than 1 5th step, you know what it is. Dear God, please let there be something new.

Because we've all done the same damn things and think we invented sin. We think we invented sex. We fail you know, and and they're boring a lot of time. Just really boring. You kind of doze off, you know.

And, my sponsor my sponsor was doing his fist step with a guy one time and and the fellow had some kind of gastric attack or something, and he had to quit doing the fist up and rush off to the hospital to get some relief. And my sponsor said, you know, he said, for a long time, I was afraid I was gonna kill somebody with my force step. So Tommy did his step with me. Took a lot of time. I I had read I looked around at the literature to find out is there any any appropriate way to take a 5th step.

I'll save you some time. You just listen. You share when you can, and you listen. I didn't know about sharing in that time though, in the first step. The first time I did it.

And Tommy got through with this this step, and we went we went off different directions. Glad what he did. And so I called him a day or 2 later and said, how you feel? And he said, feel fine. Said, I kinda feel like I belong to alcoholics anonymous now.

I I said, I feel pretty good. I said, well, you sound a little little not as enthusiastic as I'd like here. What, what's going on? He said, well, he said, to tell the truth, I feel like you know every damn thing in the world about me, and I don't know that much about you. And what I'd really like is if if you do your 4 step with me.

I've never been able to command any real respect from people that I sponsor. They just they just don't recognize that I'm the guru. But I had that third that I hadn't done. So I went back and did the whole thing with him the next weekend. And Tommy and I have formed a bond over the years that's unlike was the first one that I not unlike some I've had since, but it was the first one of the first really close bonds I'd ever had with another man.

Always, there'd been the macho part interfering with the friendship. And here we were, we both knew each other totally. And, I'm a skeptic and a cynic by nature. And I tell this because I feel obligated to do so because I've been a skeptic and a cynic to many people when they talk about what their spiritual events are. Tommy moved back to Canada after 2 years.

And one day, I don't know why, I just felt to be that I need to call him. I had his telephone number, so I called and I got no answer. I got a busy signal all day long. And I had his sister's telephone number, and I called her and I said, I can't get a hold of Tommy. Is everything alright at that?

She said, well, matter of fact, his house just burned to the ground yesterday. Lost everything. A little later, I had a ruptured appendix. And they thrust me to the hospital and had an emergency surgery on me. Tommy called me that day.

Tommy called me that day. We're very close. We can sit down in the room in in a matter of 10 minutes. We're right back where we right back where we started. That's occurred to me over, not in the same degree, but that feeling of knowing people, sharing your life with people, having no having nothing standing in between you and them is a wonderful thing.

It's a great feeling. It's a freeing feeling to be who you are. Are. And, you know, one thing about that 5th step is when you've told everybody about your deal. I really think you you gotta be careful who you select.

You should not select a Chinese speaking taxi driver at the airport. You should talk to someone who knows exactly what you're doing, someone you admire and respect, And tell them about yourself. That's really, I think, very, very important. You you just it gives it a a great freedom to have somebody know who you are. And when you're in a meeting with your sponsor, and it comes around and they say, if you ever experience fear, you can't bluff anymore.

It's like playing poker, you know, when somebody knows what your whole card is. You have to force you to be yourself around other people, which is really what we're trying to do. We're getting into reality, who we really are, what we really think, what we've really experienced. And our lives improve dramatically when we go through that. And we have we have some promises with the 5th step.

If I could find them in about 20 minutes. They're followed just after the, the step. They're not quoted often, but I wanna point them out to you. By the way, there is a prayer for fear that's given to us. It's just ask God what he would have us be.

What would you have us be? And if you be what what you think he would want you to be, you'll know. Most of the time when we talk about God's will, we ask ourselves, what what is God's will? We got a pretty good idea of what the right thing is to do. Once we have taken this step, step 5, withholding nothing, we are delighted.

We can look the world in the eye. We can be alone at perfect peace and ease. Our fears fall from us. We begin to feel the nearness of our creator. We may have had certain spiritual beliefs, but now we've begun to have a spiritual experience.

That feeling of drink the drink problem has disappeared will often come strongly. We feel we are on the broad highway walking hand in hand with the spirit of the universe. The book advises us to go home, look over our 4th and 5th step work, because this is the arc we're gonna walk through to freedom. Knowing who we are, what we are, and what's motivated us in our lives. We have a good idea of what the causes and conditions of our failures were when we get through with this part of the step.

And that's where we need to be when we begin with step 6, which we'll do at what time, Lee? 1 o'clock today? 1:30. 1:30 today? Thank you for your attention.

You'll have a nice quiet place here. I'll turn the mic down a little bit so you can sleep without being interrupted, and we'll go forward from here. We're at an interesting point in the steps. From my observation, many, many people come into Alcoholics Anonymous and stall out at various spots. Step 3 is one of those spots.

A lot of people die on step 3 because they never get beyond never get into the action. And then people do step step 45 and are greatly relieved at the what they found. They go back and read their book and say I've covered everything. They say their little prayer, and we're going to make amends one of these days. We are.

We really are. We're gonna straighten this thing out, and then they get to helping other people a little bit. And you can literally you can stay sober and alcoholics anonymous. At that point, I think. A lot of people, I think, do.

But I think there's a deep deeper level that you can go to if you're willing to continue the work. And the work's just as hard from this point forward as it was from the beginning. This is the fulcrum. This is the place where the steps move from me to those around me. I I didn't think I hurt anyone with what I did.

That was one of my things. If I'm hurting anybody, I'm hurting myself. Just by God, leave me alone. And, my wife heard that song over and over and over again. You know?

It's like a country western almost. But, of course, we did. We hurt people. And so when you finished up those steps and you understand something about what's gone wrong, what your part was in this process, that's the best place you'll ever be in your life to recognize what you've done to other people and why other people have acted the way they have and how you are gonna have to deal with those kind of issues as you go forward. The step 6 says we were entirely ready to have God remove all these defects of character.

And the next step, you know, talks about only asking him to take away our shortcomings. And that's 2 paragraphs in the big book of Alcoholics Anonymous. And we slide right through those like nothing happened. But I think there's a little little more to that. We've come a long way.

You know, you we've on this road this road to reality, we've recognized, first of all, where we were. We are we're step back to step 1. We were powerless. Alcohol was our big problem. We began to recognize in the unmanageability that we were not, capable of running life to suit ourselves.

We if we're observant, we come to believe that there's some power working in Alcoholics Anonymous. God, as as you understand him. And that, it will restore your sanity. And the sanity, I didn't mention this this morning, but I really believe that sanity that as Bill talks about it, and you'll find it in the 10th over near the 10th step in the big book, is the insanity of taking the first drink. It's not that we were crazy.

I was put off with that for a while because I could add 2 and 2. I knew I had added 2 and 2, so I wasn't crazy. So I could, couldn't handle that. But I found that I read very carefully and found out where I couldn't very well explain why I drank in the face of what I had done before. So that was the, issue of sanity, which I had to deal with.

Another awakening, if you will. I made a commitment. I made a commitment to try to live my life to some values other than what I want, To try to live my life committed to what I thought a power greater than myself would have me be. What Alcoholics Anonymous gave me the opportunity and, duty to, pass on what I had been given. And I began to feel good, better about myself.

It's hard, you know. It's hard to when you know you're an alcoholic, and you know at the end of the day, you haven't had a drink, and you know that you're trying to turn your life around and you'd know that you have tried to help somebody that day, it's hard to feel bad about yourself. You just go to bed and you feel a little better about yourself, and you begin to lighten up. You get on the pink cloud as they talk about. And you can live on the pink cloud if you want to.

Okay. We shared our findings with somebody else about ourselves, and that gave us a a great freedom. We don't have to hide anything anymore. We're okay the way we were, warts and all, as the Al Anon program is gonna talk about. And now we're ready to have these defects of character removed.

Wouldn't you like to have them gone? Well, maybe so. Maybe. Maybe. Entirely ready.

Do you realize how much ready that is? It's about all the ready there is. You know? I have promised myself for many, many years that I wouldn't do what I'm about to do right now. I'm powerless over this.

I have a story that has to do with entirely ready that I've I should quit telling, but I I just like I say, I've got a little I'm powerless over this thing. It's about a man who's about I don't know. He's 50 years old, I guess. Had his own business, doing well in life. Had everything, seemed like.

And he, but there was a lady who worked in his office, an extremely attractive lady. He was drawn to her. He was ready to have a closer relationship with her. But in biblical terms of him, she would have none. So on his 50th birthday, he walked into his office.

And here she comes right over to him, has a flower in her hand, pins the flower in his lapel, gives him a little kiss on the cheek and a little hug, and said, happy birthday, boss. And he said, well, thank you. Thank you. And she said, you know, I've known for some time that you wanted a a little closer relationship with me. He said, well, yes.

Yes. And she said and I've been kind of standoffish. And he said, well, it's, you know, it's okay. It's okay. She said, but would you like to come over to my apartment this afternoon after work and let us get a little better acquainted?

And he was ready. Yes. Yes. So he said, when should I come? And she said, well, let's make it at 5:30.

And he said, let's synchronize our watches. So he got at 5:30. He pushed the doorbell. She came to the door, invited him in, took his coat, said, would you like to have a drink? And gave him a drink, set him down on the couch, and talked to him a little bit.

And she said, would you mind terribly if I slipped into something a little more comfortable? And he said, oh oh, no. So she went into her she went into her bed. So she went into her she went into her bedroom to slip into something more comfortable, and he decided that he needed to get ready. Suddenly, his necks wall up big.

His chest expanded. He ripped off his tire, took off his shoes because he's kinda cramping his feet. And his shirt got to be too tight, and he ripped off his shirt. He called out and said, are you ready? And she said, not quite.

In a minute. And he got a little more ready. He took off his trousers. He called out again, are you ready? And she said, I'm ready.

Come on in. And when he walked through the bedroom door, he was entirely ready. And his whole office staff said, happy birthday to you. Happy birthday to you. And then he knew and then he knew humility, like they're talking about some other steps we've got there.

I wasn't, you know, you gotta be you gotta pay attention to these things. The defects of character that you find, the arrogance, the the things that we do, some of these things, we we really kinda like. I had a bad temper. I was I could go off like that, and I used that temper. And I didn't really try to control that temper because I used it to to, keep people away from me if they got close, and I didn't want them close.

I, I used it to create fear, And I knew what I was doing at times when I did that. And this was not an attractive thing to me, but it was a useful tool for me. I was a trial lawyer. And I was, you know, I was told somebody today, they affectionately called me the alligator gar in my, in my law office because I was man, I went after people. And when I got sober, I began to realize that that wasn't gonna work for me.

I was not gonna be able to practice humility. I was not gonna be able to practice kindness and tolerance and consideration for people and be that kind of person. I thought maybe I gotta give up being a trial lawyer. But I decided before I did that, I'd start trying to give up some of these things. And what I found, in my case, the first time I did the 6th step, I went home and said, I am entirely ready to give up these defects of character that I found in the in the 4th and 5th step.

But I wasn't dealing with anything specific. I was dealing with the generality. And not too surprisingly, not much happened because I had a temper again in a little while, and I had this kind of problem and this kind of problem. And, some of these things were useful to me. You know, gossip.

Gossip's just my concern for others. Besides, it kinda makes me feel like I'm one of the bunch. You know? I'm kinda I know. Nobody else knows, but I know.

And if you if I tell you, you'll probably tell me something. You know? That and I get into I can get caught up in all that of stuff. And some of these things I had the alligator shoe syndrome, I call it. I began to notice that the quality of newcomers coming to my group were not quite as good as when I came in.

You know, we have some undesirables and alcoholics anonymous. Do you know that? None of these things are really very useful to you in the long haul. Anything that's harmful to another human being is what we've gotta get rid of, and almost any kind of self centeredness that we have is gonna fall within that category, I believe. I, I think that you have to watch your thoughts.

You have to be aware of what they are. Watch your thoughts because they become your actions. Watch your actions because they become your habits. Watch your habits because they become your character, and your character becomes your destiny. So we have to pay close attention to what's going on up here.

No one can weed your garden, your mental garden, except yourself. No one knows what's up there except you except you. So you're you're charged. We're charged with that that job. And resentments, you know, they're bitter, angry thoughts.

All of these things center in the mind. Have you ever noticed how much of this has to do with your thoughts? What's a resentment? It's a thought about something what that happened in the past. It's not happening now.

It's a judgment that you're exercising in your mind about an event as you observed it that occurred in the past. And we dredge it up again and again and again. We have fear. That's something that generally hasn't happened. It's something we anticipate may happen.

We project it may happen, and it's gonna be bad. It's gonna be even worse than that. You can't imagine how bad it's gonna be. Yeah. You know, it's like my my cuticle cancer.