Daily Reflections · January 4
Begin Where You Are
The line before today’s passage says no member made a career of this work. In 1940 an old fireman asked what that meant for a janitor.
Today’s reading
The reading for January 4 in Daily Reflections, AA’s book of short readings by members. Its passage comes from Alcoholics Anonymous, the Big Book, page 19, in the chapter “There Is a Solution”: two sentences about what comes after the drinking stops.
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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Past the meeting room
The passage says that stopping drinking was only the start, and points to somewhere harder.
- Where is it hardest for you to act like the person you are at a meeting?
- Who at home or at work would notice first that you’re working the program?
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The small stuff
The member who wrote the reflection finds the day’s small irritations a truer test than any meeting.
- What small annoyance gets the worst of you on an ordinary day?
- What would patience look like there, just once, today?
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What’s the angle?
Read beside the history below: old Tom asked what the job really was, and named it. This page’s thought is that service gets clearer when someone says plainly what’s being asked.
- Is there a job you’ve taken on that needs naming more honestly?
- Where have you expected someone to do a lot for nothing?
Behind the words
What’s the angle?
The sentence before today’s passage says that none of the members makes “a sole vocation of this work,” and the Big Book’s foreword of 1939 calls their work with other alcoholics “an avocation.” A year later the line was tested in New York.
In February 1940 two members found the New York group a home of its own, a former stable at 334½ West 24th Street, and guaranteed the rent: AA’s first clubhouse. Volunteers painted it and answered the telephone. But they tired of sweeping it, and some of the night owls they handed keys to came in drunk. Bill W. told what happened next in AA Comes of Age.
They went to old Tom M., a retired fireman with a pension, not long out of the asylum at Rockland. Would he like a nice room at the club, and look after the place? “What’s the angle?” Tom asked. Coffee, cleaning and leading the drunks out, seven days a week, was a janitor’s job, he said, and a janitor got paid. “I’m doing my Twelfth Step work free,” he told them, but not that. They haggled him down to the last cent, and he took it. Lois W. remembered him as hard-boiled, kindly and honest, “a good watchdog.”
“But old Tom was right,” Bill said. The same question came round again over AA’s office staff and everyone else it hired, and in time it was settled as the Eighth Tradition: no money, ever, for carrying the message to a drunk face to face, but AA’s service centers may hire the help they need. October 26 and November 14 tell of the paid job at Towns Hospital that Bill himself was talked out of.
More on old Tom and the paid help: What’s the angle?, in Rule 62. On the clubhouse, where Bill and Lois later lived upstairs: About fifty homes, in Number One Man.
Where the line fell
Bill W.’s own sorting, in AA Comes of Age (1957), of what AA never paid for and whom it paid by then. The wording is this page’s.
Never paid
Carrying the message, one drunk to another.
- Face-to-face work with a drunk, by anyone, ever
- Tom’s own Twelfth Step work, which he did free
The line just before today’s passage is about this side: the work nobody makes a living at.
Paid, by the 1950s
- Cooks in the clubs
- Janitors who swept them out
- The women who answered the telephones in the central offices
- Bill himself, a royalty as a writer of AA’s books
Two or three hundred hired help in all, Bill reckoned, among some 200,000 members.
Sources
- Alcoholics Anonymous (the Big Book). Works Publishing, 1939: the foreword and “There Is a Solution”; fourth edition, AA World Services, 2001. Page 19, which the reading cites.
- Alcoholics Anonymous Comes of Age. Alcoholics Anonymous Publishing, 1957. “Unity: The Second Legacy” (old Tom and the clubhouse).
- Pass It On. AA World Services, 1984. Chapter 13 (the 24th Street clubhouse, 1940).
- Lois Remembers. Al-Anon Family Groups, 1979. Chapter 11 (Tom M.).
- Twelve Steps and Twelve Traditions. AA Grapevine and Alcoholics Anonymous Publishing, 1953. Tradition Eight.
- Daily Reflections. AA World Services, 1990. January 4 · aa.org
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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.