Daily Reflections · November 12
Morning Thoughts
The last page of the Big Book’s main text, and the story that follows it: Dr. Bob’s four reasons for passing on what he learned.
Today’s reading
The reading for November 12 in Daily Reflections, AA’s book of short readings by members. Its passage comes from Alcoholics Anonymous, the Big Book, page 164, the last page of its main text, in the chapter “A Vision for You.”
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Themes and asks
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Today’s question
Today’s line gives the morning quiet time a practical job, and points it at someone other than yourself.
- If you asked that question this morning, who came to mind?
- What is one small thing you could do today for someone still struggling, even if they never learn it was you?
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Your own house
Right after today’s line, the Big Book makes the answers depend on the asker’s own condition.
- What in your own life needs tending before you’re much use to anyone else today?
- What do you have now that you didn’t have when you came in, and who could use it?
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Smaller than expected
The member who wrote the reflection finds a daily calling where they had long looked for a large one.
- What grand purpose are you waiting on that keeps you from today’s small one?
- What would Step Twelve look like for you on an ordinary weekday?
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Still learning
The paragraph today’s line comes from opens modestly, offering the whole book as a beginning rather than the last word.
- What have you learned about staying sober that you didn’t find in a book?
- Where are you treating something you’ve read as the last word?
Behind the words
Turn the page
Today’s passage is from the last page of the main text of the Big Book, near the end of “A Vision for You,” the chapter Bill W. wrote to close it. A few paragraphs earlier, the chapter imagines its reader telling himself, “I’m jittery and alone.” In 1939 that was most readers: the book’s foreword counted “more than one hundred men and women” who had recovered, gathered in a handful of places. The chapter tells him the book may hold all he needs to begin. Today’s line turns him toward someone else who is still drinking.
Bill came back to the chapter. Rereading it for the first issue of the Grapevine, in June 1944, he stopped at its hope that a traveling member would someday find AA wherever he went. Five years on there were hundreds of centers, and he closed his editorial with the chapter’s last words, the short paragraph just below today’s line. In July 1950 he read the same lines to end AA’s first International Convention, in Cleveland: “These were the words we took home with us.”
In 1939 the chapter ended on page 179, and the next thing a reader came to was the personal stories, opening with Dr. Bob’s, “The Doctor’s Nightmare.” In later editions the chapter ends on page 164, and his story still comes first; AA’s General Service Conference asked in 2001 that it stay there. He wrote it, he says, nearly four years after his last drink, and near its end he says that much of his time goes to passing on what he learned. He gives four reasons.
The note that heads his story now says that, to his death in 1950, he carried AA’s message to more than 5,000 alcoholics, with Sister Ignatia at St. Thomas Hospital in Akron, and charged none of them for his care. Writing about Cleveland that September, Bill had put the count at St. Thomas at 4,000. Three years later, in the Twelve and Twelve’s essay on Tradition Five, Bill wrote that members who neglect “those who are still sick” put their own lives and sanity in danger.
More on the reader the chapter imagines: Far from a meeting, in Jittery and Alone. On Dr. Bob at St. Thomas: The flower room, in I Just Work Here. On who wrote the Big Book’s chapters: To Wives, in By the Carload.
Four reasons
Near the end of his story, in the Big Book since 1939, Dr. Bob gave four reasons for the time he spent passing on what he had learned. Under each, a place where AA’s books come back to it. The words in quotation marks are the books’.
Bill W., 1953In the Twelve and Twelve’s essay on Tradition Five, what binds members to the alcoholic still drinking is “self-preservation, duty, and love.”
The Big Book, 1939A few paragraphs before today’s line, the same chapter pictures a few men in a new city who have “discovered the joy of helping others to face life again.”
Paying “my debt to the man who took time to pass it on to me.”
Who he meantHis story doesn’t name him. It was Bill W., who talked with him at a friend’s house in Akron on Mother’s Day 1935, from five o’clock until after eleven. Bill said later, “I knew that I needed this alcoholic as much as he needed me.”
“A little more insurance for myself against a possible slip.”
The Big Book, 1939“Working with Others” opens on the same thought: nothing, it says, will “so much insure immunity from drinking” as intensive work with other alcoholics. Unlike most of the early members, Dr. Bob wrote, he craved liquor through most of his first two and a half years sober.
Threads
Each one opens the calendar with its days lit up.
Sources
- Alcoholics Anonymous (the Big Book). Works Publishing, 1939: the foreword, “Working with Others,” “A Vision for You” and Dr. Bob’s story, “The Doctor’s Nightmare”; fourth edition, AA World Services, 2001, for the note that heads it and the page numbers (the reading cites page 164).
- The Language of the Heart. AA Grapevine, 1988. Bill W., “The Shape of Things to Come,” June 1944, and “We Came of Age,” September 1950.
- Twelve Steps and Twelve Traditions. AA Grapevine and Alcoholics Anonymous Publishing, 1953. The essay on Tradition Five.
- Dr. Bob and the Good Oldtimers. AA World Services, 1980. Chapter VI, “Two alcoholics meet.”
- Advisory Actions of the General Service Conference of Alcoholics Anonymous, 1951–2022, as posted by Area 8, for the 2001 action keeping Dr. Bob’s story first.
- Daily Reflections. AA World Services, 1990. November 12 · 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.