One Drunk to Another A Daily Reprieve
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Daily Reflections · November 2

Keeping Optimism Afloat

What staying dry alone doesn’t do: a line from Bill W.’s 1958 article on Step Eleven, the one Step he admitted he was still a beginner at.

Today’s reading

The reading for November 2 in Daily Reflections, AA’s book of short readings by members. Its passage comes from The Language of the Heart, page 240, from Bill W.’s 1958 Grapevine article “Take Step Eleven.”

This page doesn’t reprint it. Read it free at aa.org, then come back for the asks.

Read it at aa.org

Themes and asks

  1. Dry, but stuck

    The paragraphs just before the passage, in Bill W.’s article, describe AAs, Bill counting himself in, who aren’t drinking and whose friends say they’re doing fine, but who know inside that they’ve stopped growing. The passage is where he says what he thinks is missing.

    • Where in your life are you staying sober but standing still?
    • Who tells you you’re doing well, and what do you know that they don’t?

  2. A small share

    Right after the passage, Bill set a modest bar: if members gave prayer and meditation even a twentieth of the time they gave to helping other alcoholics, he wrote, the results could reach far. Behind the words has more.

    • Set the time you give to quiet prayer or meditation beside the time you give to meetings and helping others. How do they compare?
    • What would five minutes a day look like, and where would you find them?

  3. Still a beginner

    The man who wrote the Steps, sober more than twenty-three years, said he was a beginner at this one, and confessed he had given little time to his own advice on it. Read that way, nobody is past the basics.

    • What do you recommend to others that you don’t do much yourself?
    • Where would it help you to be a beginner again?

  4. Hope, slowly

    Today’s title belongs to the reading, not to Bill: optimism is a word his article never uses. The member who wrote the reflection credits two things: not drinking, and what the program’s principles add to it.

    • What looks less bleak to you now than it did a year ago?
    • Where do you still expect the worst, and what would it take to expect something else?

Behind the words

The beginner’s class

The passage comes from “Take Step Eleven,” an article Bill W. wrote for the June 1958 issue of the Grapevine, AA’s monthly magazine. Thirty years later it was gathered into The Language of the Heart, the Grapevine’s book of his articles. When he wrote it, Bill had been sober more than twenty-three years. He opened by confessing that at Step Eleven he was “still very much in the beginner’s class.”

Then he went through several of the other Steps. Step One had been easy, and Step Two had come with his spiritual experience at the start. Taking stock of himself and owning up had grown easier with years of practice, and Twelfth Step work had been mostly joy. Plenty of AAs, himself among them, he wrote, stay for years in that “rather easy spiritual kindergarten,” until they grow dissatisfied, often when a calamity or a big upset shows they’ve stopped growing, even while friends tell them how well they’re doing. The passage is his answer to what’s missing.

The reading stops partway through Bill’s sentence. In the article it goes on to a condition: “if we try hard and work at it continually.” The next sentence puts a number on the effort. If members gave Step Eleven “even five percent of the time” they gave to Step Twelve, he wrote, the results could reach far. The rest of the article speaks to the doubter, who can try prayer as an experiment.

Near the end, Bill admitted he had just reread his own chapter on Step Eleven in the Twelve and Twelve, published five years before, and was astonished at how little time he had given to “my own elementary advice.” Five months earlier the Grapevine had printed his “The Next Frontier: Emotional Sobriety,” drawn from a letter to a friend. In it he told of a depression that had nearly flattened him one autumn, and wrote that many old-timers who had stayed dry through severe tests “still find they often lack emotional sobriety.”

More on the doubter the rest of the article was written for: Good for God, in Suggestions Only. On Bill’s long depression: The quarter mile, in Number One Man.

His own Steps, in 1958

How Bill rated his progress on each Step he named in “Take Step Eleven,” in the order of the Steps. The ones the article doesn’t name are marked Not named.

  1. 1Easy.
  2. 2“An outright gift,” with his spiritual experience at the start.
  3. 3Not named
  4. 4Not too hard, though often done badly.
  5. 5The same. Years of practice made both easier.
  6. 6Not named
  7. 7Not named
  8. 8Not named
  9. 9Much like Four and Five.
  10. 10Not named
  11. 11Still a beginner. Today’s passage is about this one.
  12. 12“Little else than great joy,” and for most members, he thought, the easiest of all.

Threads

Each one opens the calendar with its days lit up.

Sources
  • The Language of the Heart. AA Grapevine, 1988. Bill W., “Take Step Eleven,” June 1958 (the reading cites page 240); and “The Next Frontier: Emotional Sobriety,” January 1958.
  • Daily Reflections. AA World Services, 1990. November 2 · 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.

Printed from One Drunk to Another, an independent AA history · onedrunktoanother.org/today/november-2/