Daily Resolutions

Today’s passage reached Daily Reflections by way of As Bill Sees It, the 1967 book of short pieces from Bill W.’s letters and writings. He made the same point at more length in the Grapevine of April 1959, in an article on what AA should look for in its leaders. One thing was vision, the ability to make good estimates of the future, and he stopped to meet an objection. Some might think such striving “a sort of heresy,” he wrote, since AAs were always telling themselves “One day at a time.” But “that valued maxim,” he went on, “really refers to our emotional lives and means only that we are not to repine over the past nor wishfully fantasy or daydream about our future.” Planning was another matter: “God has endowed us human beings with considerable capability for foresight and he evidently expects us to use it.”

Where the maxim came from, nobody has been able to say. Frank M., the archivist at AA’s General Service Office, answered someone who asked in 1989, in a letter that AA in Cleveland quotes on its website: “it’s difficult to pin-point the exact ‘moment.’” Ruth Hock, AA’s first secretary and not an alcoholic, wrote in 1958 that when she started work with Bill in January 1936 three slogans were already in daily use: Easy Does It, Live and Let Live and First Things First. The Big Book of 1939 prints those three together. One Day at a Time is not among them.

The idea was there, though, before the wording settled. Anne S., Dr. Bob S.’s wife, kept a notebook through her years in the Oxford Group, and on its ninth page she wrote: “Be willing to live a day at a time, an hour at a time.” In the summer of 1935 Dr. Bob and Bill sat by the bed of Bill D., a lawyer strapped down in an Akron hospital, who told them he’d like to quit for some months, until he got things straightened out. In his story, as the Big Book has carried it since its second edition of 1955, they asked whether he could quit for twenty-four hours. Anybody could do that, he said. “Just twenty-four hours at a time,” they told him. Back in New York that August, Bill ran into Clint F., an old drinking partner, in a brokerage office. “It’s just one day at a time,” he told him, as Pass It On gives it from Clint’s account.

The Big Book has the span without the slogan. Its chapter “Into Action” says that what an alcoholic has is “a daily reprieve,” which is where these pages get their name, and it starts each morning by thinking about “the twenty-four hours ahead.” In 1948 Richmond W., a member in Daytona Beach, Florida, had the readings he carried on small cards printed as a little book, a page for every date, and called it Twenty-Four Hours a Day. By 1959, when Bill wrote, the saying was common enough that he expected it to be thrown back at anyone who planned ahead.

More on Anne’s notebook: Quiet time, in Call Me Anne. On the two men at Bill D.’s bed: 855 Ardmore, in I Just Work Here. On Richmond W.’s little book: Pocket cards, in Suggestions Only.