Daily Reflections · December 13
Thinking of Others
The book of 1939 called its writers ex-alcoholics in today’s passage. Eight years later the word was gone from it, and from the three other places they had used it of themselves.
Today’s reading
The reading for December 13 in Daily Reflections, AA’s book of short readings by members. Its passage comes from Alcoholics Anonymous, the Big Book, page 20, in “There Is a Solution,” the chapter after Bill W.’s own story: the last sentence of the paragraph where the writers say what the book will have to go into.
This page doesn’t reprint it. Read it free at aa.org, then come back for the asks.
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Themes and asks
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A matter of life
The passage doesn’t present thinking of others as good manners, or as a duty to get round to once you’re well. It treats it as part of staying alive.
- Do you treat helping others as part of staying sober, or as something extra you do once you are?
- When did thinking about someone else get you through a day you might have drunk?
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Your own weather
The member who wrote the reflection is candid about a self-centered streak that sobriety hasn’t erased, and about where they find relief from it.
- When did your own mood last decide how you treated someone?
- Whom did you talk to after your last meeting, and whom did you walk past?
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Useful to others
The sentence just before the passage, in the same paragraph, says what most of the writers sense makes them more useful to other people: patience with their faults and their views, and taking their opinions seriously. This page reads the two sentences together: it’s hard to help anyone you can’t put up with.
- Whose opinions do you find hardest to respect, and could you be of use to them anyway?
- Where has impatience with someone kept you from helping them?
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What you call yourself
The history below follows a word that once stood in today’s passage, the one its writers used for themselves, until the book dropped it in 1947. Read beside that, the page asks what you call yourself, and what the name says about where you stand.
- When you say at a meeting that you’re an alcoholic, what do the words mean to you today?
- Do you think of yourself as recovered, recovering or something else, and why?
Behind the words
Ex-alcoholics
Today’s passage closes a paragraph near the top of page 20 of the Big Book, in “There Is a Solution,” where the writers admit the book must touch on touchy subjects and say they’ll try to avoid a quarrel. In the book of 1939 they had another word for themselves in it: ex-alcoholics. They used the same word of themselves in three other places: in their own lines in The Doctor’s Opinion, two pages earlier in the same chapter, and in “A Vision for You.”
In December 1945 the Grapevine, AA’s monthly magazine, printed the story of a veteran of both world wars. About a year before, isolated and drinking hard, he had remembered that AA was based in New York City and written to it, asking the postmaster, on the envelope, to track it down for him. When the letter was handed in, the postman said, as he was later told, “We found you for the soldier. Now you fix him up.”
Letters came back from the office at Box 459, often daily and mostly by air mail. When at last he got to New York, the people in the office told him, as he put it, what he would be from then on: “Not an ex-alcoholic, but always an alcoholic who has a disease which has been arrested.”
In June 1947, in the book’s eleventh printing, the four ex-alcoholics became ex-problem drinkers, and so they read today. The histories this page draws on don’t say who made the change, or why. Dr. Bob and the Good Oldtimers, AA’s 1980 book on Dr. Bob and the early days in the Midwest, notes in passing that in those years outsiders, and sometimes members too, used words AA members by then thought misleading: cure, reformed alcoholic, and ex-alcoholic itself.
More on the office at Box 459 that wrote back to him: Box 459, in Trusted Servants. On answering every letter one by one, from the start: No form letters, in Jittery and Alone. On how AA speaks today of an illness that can be arrested but not cured: A far safer term, in An Illness of This Sort.
One word, four places
The four places where the 1939 book’s writers used the word, in the order they come, with today’s pages. The passage itself isn’t quoted, only the word that changed. The short lines are this page’s.
The Doctor’s OpinionAt the front of the book
Where the writers, laymen as they say, find that the doctor’s theory of an allergy makes sense of their own drinking.
1939
ex-alcoholics1947ex-problem drinkersThere Is a SolutionPage 18
Where one who has found the solution can generally win another alcoholic’s trust in a few hours, as psychiatrists and families often can’t.
1939
ex-alcoholic1947ex-problem drinkerThere Is a SolutionPage 20Today’s passage
In the middle of today’s passage, which isn’t reprinted here.
1939
ex-alcoholics1947ex-problem drinkersA Vision for YouPage 151
Where they smile at a drinker, dry for the moment, who says he doesn’t miss it.
1939
ex-alcoholics1947ex-problem drinkers
June 1947 The book’s eleventh printing makes all four changes. The tenth, of August 1946, still has the old word.
Threads
Each one opens the calendar with its days lit up.
Sources
- Alcoholics Anonymous. Works Publishing, 1939; fourth edition, AA World Services, 2001. “There Is a Solution” (the reading cites page 20), The Doctor’s Opinion and “A Vision for You,” in the first edition and the fourth.
- “1st Printings,” the differences among the first edition’s printings 1, 5 and 10 to 15, by page and line, at silkworth.net.
- Arthur S., A Narrative Timeline of AA History, 2009. The entry for June 1947.
- AA Grapevine, December 1945. Dick B., “Mail Order Therapy Builds Bridge from Isolation to Sobriety,” pages 6–7 and 10.
- Dr. Bob and the Good Oldtimers. AA World Services, 1980. Chapter X.
- Daily Reflections. AA World Services, 1990. December 13 · aa.org
Something wrong here? A date, a name, a quotation? Let me know
Daily Reflections is AA’s book of readings for every day of the year, each written by a member about a favorite passage from AA’s literature. A Daily Reprieve gives each day questions to sit with and the story behind its words.