Daily Reflections · October 23
What We Know Best
Keeping a group to the job it does best: the start of Bill W.’s essay on Tradition Five, and the old proverb he opened it with.
Today’s reading
The reading for October 23 in Daily Reflections, AA’s book of short readings by members. Its passage comes from Twelve Steps and Twelve Traditions, page 150.
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Themes and asks
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Keep to the shoe
The passage sums up the Tradition with the proverb about the shoemaker: a group is at its best when it keeps to its own work.
- What does your home group do better than anything else?
- Has it taken on something lately that pulls it away from that?
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Your own story
A little further on, the essay says a member’s gift for reaching a newcomer has nothing to do with learning or a way with words. What counts is being an alcoholic who found a way out. Read beside today’s title, the thing you know best is your own story.
- What part of your story do you tend to leave out when you tell it?
- When did someone’s plain story reach you when advice couldn’t?
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No angle
In the story the essay tells, a suspicious patient wants to know what his visitor gets out of it. The honest answer is the visitor’s own sobriety. He asks for no money, won’t argue religion with him, and has no plan for the man’s marriage or business.
- When you try to help someone, what do you bring that they didn’t ask for?
- What would it look like to offer only what you know firsthand?
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It lands on you
The member who wrote today’s reflection doesn’t leave this Tradition to the groups. The writer takes it as a personal job, and a serious one.
- How are you passing on what you were given, right now?
- Today, does that feel more like a weight or a gift?
Behind the words
A proverb Bill kept using
The passage opens Bill W.’s essay on Tradition Five in the Twelve and Twelve, the Tradition that gives each AA group “but one primary purpose.” It begins with an old proverb about a shoemaker and his last, the wooden form shaped like a foot that a shoe is built on.
The saying is at least as old as Pliny the Elder, who told its story in the first century. A shoemaker found fault with the straps on a sandal in one of the painter Apelles’ pictures, and Apelles fixed them. The next day the shoemaker started in on the leg, and Apelles told him a shoemaker should judge nothing above the shoe. The advice, Pliny wrote, became a proverb.
Bill had used the proverb before. In April 1948 he opened his Grapevine article on Tradition Five with it, and admitted it was “Trite, yes.” The article looked ahead to the temptations success would bring: lending AA’s name to good work in the field of alcohol, financing and endorsing other causes, and believing talk of AA as a new religion that could save the world. He saw it all as a heady new wine, “each bottle marked ‘Success’!” He used the proverb again in 1953, to open the essay, and in his talk on the Traditions at St. Louis in 1955.
The 1953 essay adds a story. A member, restless one day, takes the subway to Towns Hospital to find a drunk to work with, and Dr. William D. Silkworth points him to “an awfully tough Irishman” on the third floor. The man wants to know what the scheme costs and what the visitor gets out of it, and bristles at any talk of religion. The book doesn’t name the visitor. Pass It On says he was “obviously, Bill himself.”
The question kept coming back as AA grew. In February 1958, with members asking what AA could do about drug addiction, Bill wrote that a group “cannot take on all the personal problems of its members, let alone the problems of the whole world.” Members who wanted to help with drug problems, he added, should be encouraged to form groups of their own, but not to call them AA groups.
More on the tough Irishman, and a group that tried to do everything at once: Middleton Group #1, in Rule 62. On the 1958 article: Problems other than alcohol, in Suggestions Only.
One idea
From the story in the essay. Looking back, the visitor asked what would have happened if he’d had to bring any of these into the room.
- ReligionThe man had a church of his own. The visitor said he couldn’t teach him anything about religion, and didn’t try.
- MoneyAsked what it cost, he could say, “Nothing at all.”
- Hospitals and programsHe didn’t have to say AA went in for hospitals, rehabilitation or alcohol education.
- His home and his businessThe man blamed his wife and his partner. The visitor didn’t offer to sort them out.
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 Tradition Five.
- The Language of the Heart. AA Grapevine, 1988. “Tradition Five,” April 1948, and “Problems Other Than Alcohol,” February 1958.
- Alcoholics Anonymous Comes of Age. Alcoholics Anonymous Publishing, 1957. Bill W.’s 1955 talk on the Traditions, “Unity: The Second Legacy.”
- Pass It On. AA World Services, 1984. Chapter 19.
- Pliny the Elder, The Natural History, translated by John Bostock and H. T. Riley. Henry G. Bohn, 1855–1857. Book 35, on Apelles · volume 6 at the Internet Archive
- Daily Reflections. AA World Services, 1990. October 23 · 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.