Daily Reflections · October 29
Our Survival
Why AA’s survival is personal: a line from Bill W.’s essay on Tradition Ten, and the score early AA kept of who got well and who came back.
Today’s reading
The reading for October 29 in Daily Reflections, AA’s book of short readings by members. Its passage comes from Twelve Steps and Twelve Traditions, page 177, the same page as October 28’s.
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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A matter of life
Coming right after the line that puts AA ahead of any other cause, the passage makes the reason personal: an alcoholic’s own life is bound up with AA’s. Read that way, looking after a meeting isn’t a favor to anyone; it’s part of staying sober.
- What keeps you sober that you’ve started treating as optional?
- Who keeps your meeting going, and what part of that could be yours?
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Said out loud
Today’s reflection is mostly about honesty: what it does in a meeting when people use it, and what it asks of someone sober every day after.
- When did someone’s honesty at a meeting change how you saw yourself?
- What’s true about you right now that you haven’t told anyone?
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The way back
The reflection keeps a way back open for anyone who walks out. For a rough sense of how often people take it, the Big Book’s 1955 foreword says that of those who tried a few meetings and left, about two in three began coming back.
- Who used to come to your meeting and doesn’t now? What would it take to call them?
- If you’ve ever come back after drinking, who made it easier to walk back in?
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For something
The reflection’s writer believes in having been made for a purpose, and closes with a prayer close to Step Eleven’s. Read beside today’s title, surviving is where that purpose starts, not where it ends.
- What do you think your sobriety is for?
- What will you ask for today, and what will you do about the answer?
Behind the words
Counting survivors
The passage ends a paragraph in the middle of Bill W.’s essay on Tradition Ten in the Twelve and Twelve, one sentence after October 28’s. Having kept AA out of every outside fight, Bill gives the reason in personal terms: for the alcoholics in AA, the Fellowship’s survival and their own are the same thing. AA Comes of Age has the paragraph again, lightly reworded, in Bill’s talk on unity at St. Louis in 1955, as the book printed it two years later.
Bill had counted survivors before. One day in November 1937, he and Dr. Bob sat in Dr. Bob’s living room in Akron and went over their cases. Twenty or more of the worst had stayed sober for two years or so, and in all, they figured, more than forty were sober. As Bill told it, it burst on them that “a new light was shining into the dark world of the alcoholic.” Pass It On allows that he may have stretched the twenty. In 1939 the Big Book’s foreword spoke for “more than one hundred men and women” who had recovered.
By 1955, when the Big Book’s second edition came out, its new foreword gave the score in shares. Of those who joined and “really tried,” it said, half got sober right away and stayed that way, a quarter got sober after drinking again once or more, and among the rest, those who kept coming improved. It had a figure for the ones who walked out, too. Of the thousands who tried a few meetings and decided, at first, that the program wasn’t for them, about two in three began coming back as time went on. The foreword doesn’t say how any of it was counted.
In April 1958, writing in the Grapevine about the General Service Conference, Bill laid out the same chain. Each member wants to be sure of surviving alcoholism, and also wants the same for other alcoholics, and so has a stake in AA itself lasting. A miracle that keeps going on its own, he wrote, “simply isn’t in the cards.” For a member and a group alike, survival had a price: “willingness and sacrifice, vigilance and work.”
More on the count in Dr. Bob’s living room: The barest majority, in By the Carload. On the Conference, and the day at St. Louis it took over: Legacy, in Rule 62.
Keeping score
How early AA counted the ones who got well. From Bill W.’s account in AA Comes of Age, from Pass It On, and from the Big Book’s forewords of 1939 and 1955.
- 193740+staying sober in Akron and New York, by Bill and Dr. Bob’s count that November
- 1939100+men and women recovered, as the Big Book’s first foreword put it
1955Out of every 100 who came and “really tried”
- 50 sober right away, and stayed sober
- 25 sober after drinking again, once or more
- 25 the rest; those who kept coming improved
About 2 in 3 of the thousands who tried a few meetings and left began coming back as time went on.
The 1955 foreword doesn’t say how it counted. The dots show its shares, not people it counted one by one.
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 Ten.
- Alcoholics Anonymous Comes of Age. Alcoholics Anonymous Publishing, 1957. “Recovery: The First Legacy” and “Unity: The Second Legacy.”
- Pass It On. AA World Services, 1984. Chapter 9.
- Alcoholics Anonymous. Works Publishing, 1939. The foreword. And the fourth edition, AA World Services, 2001: “Foreword to Second Edition” (1955).
- The Language of the Heart. AA Grapevine, 1988. Bill W., “Guardian of AA: Our General Service Conference,” April 1958.
- Daily Reflections. AA World Services, 1990. October 29 · 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.