Daily Reflections · October 22
True Tolerance
Treating other people as we’d want to be treated: a line from Bill W.’s essay on Step Ten, written through a long depression.
Today’s reading
The reading for October 22 in Daily Reflections, AA’s book of short readings by members. Its passage comes from Twelve Steps and Twelve Traditions, page 92.
This page doesn’t reprint it. Read it free at aa.org, then come back for the asks.
Read it at aa.orgYour screen will stay on while Chairing is showing.
Themes and asks
-
Including ourselves
The passage ties tolerance to a discovery about ourselves: we’re in the same condition as the people who try our patience.
- Who have you been holding to a standard you don’t always meet yourself?
- What changes when you remember you’re in the same boat?
-
Bear with each other
The member who wrote today’s reflection lands on a plain idea of love: putting up with one another, and giving the consideration we’d hope for ourselves. Patience is one name for it.
- Where could you use more patience today, especially with someone close?
- When did someone’s patience with you make a difference?
-
Nothing to take personally
Right after the passage, the essay says there’s no point getting angry or hurt at people who are struggling to grow up, the same as we are.
- What hurt are you still carrying from someone who was probably doing the best they could?
- What would it take to set it down?
-
Pause first
The same part of the essay puts self-restraint first: thinking before we speak or write, because one unkind outburst or snap judgment can hurt a relationship for a day, or for a year.
- Where did a quick word cost you something lately?
- What helps you pause before you answer?
Behind the words
Written through a depression
The passage comes from Bill W.’s essay on Step Ten in the Twelve and Twelve, from the part about the quick “spot-check,” an inventory taken on the spot when someone or something has thrown us off balance.
Bill wrote the book in 1951 and 1952 while, as Pass It On puts it, “suffering almost constant depression.” It had come on him in 1944 and lasted, on and off, for eleven years (The quarter mile, in Number One Man, tells that story).
Earlier in the same part of the essay, Bill wrote that anger, and upsets like self-pity and hurt pride, kept alcoholics on emotional dry benders, and that these “often led straight to the bottle.” He used the same words about himself. Looking back on his fight with AA’s trustees in the late 1940s, he later said he had been “on a dry bender of the worst possible sort.”
The words had changed, too. Word for word, Bill’s essays on the Steps use emotion, in one form or another, about eleven times as often as the Big Book’s chapters on them, written in 1938. In January 1958 the Grapevine printed his “The Next Frontier: Emotional Sobriety,” drawn from a letter to a friend who also had depressions.
The title has a small history of its own. When the 1990 General Service Conference approved Daily Reflections, it asked for a page for February 29, to be an “alternate” March page titled “True Tolerance.” At aa.org today, February 29 has a different reading, and “True Tolerance” is October 22’s.
More on how Bill wrote the book, and the words each book leans on: Wit’s End, in Suggestions Only.
Where the passage sits
The second half of Bill’s essay on Step Ten, in order.
- UpsetWhenever we’re disturbed, the essay says, something is wrong with us too.
- Dry bendersAnger, self-pity and hurt pride kept alcoholics on emotional benders that often ended in a drink.
- The spot checkA quick inventory, taken in the middle of the upset.
- Restraint firstThink before speaking or writing.
- Big-shot-ismSuccess needs watching too.
- Today’s passageTrue tolerance, once we see we’re all in the same condition.
- ThenLove, a little at a time, even for people we dislike, and at day’s end the evening inventory.
Threads
Each one opens the calendar with its days lit up.
Sources
- Twelve Steps and Twelve Traditions. AA Grapevine and Alcoholics Anonymous Publishing, 1953. The essay on Step Ten.
- Pass It On. AA World Services, 1984. Chapters 20 (the trustees, quoting Alcoholics Anonymous Comes of Age, 1957) and 22 (writing the book).
- The Language of the Heart. AA Grapevine, 1988. “The Next Frontier: Emotional Sobriety,” January 1958, and the editors’ note on it.
- Alcoholics Anonymous. Works Publishing, 1939. Chapters 5 to 7, for the count, made in Wit’s End.
- AA World Services, Advisory Actions of the General Service Conference of Alcoholics Anonymous, 1951–2022, as posted by Area 8 (1990).
- Daily Reflections. AA World Services, 1990. October 22 and February 29 · 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.