Daily Reflections · October 30
Live and Let Live
Agreeing to differ: the opening of Bill W.’s essay on Tradition Ten, and one of AA’s oldest slogans, which AA’s first book gave as a rule for the house.
Today’s reading
The reading for October 30 in Daily Reflections, AA’s book of short readings by members. Its passage comes from Twelve Steps and Twelve Traditions, page 176, the opening of the essay that October 28’s and 29’s passages come from.
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Themes and asks
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Kept out of it
The passage looks at why AA has stayed out of the world’s fights, and finds the answer close to home, in an oldtimer’s remark about what members don’t argue over with each other.
- What subject do you steer clear of at meetings, and why?
- When has keeping an opinion to yourself kept a friendship?
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Mine and yours
Live and Let Live, as today’s reflection sees it, is about ownership: an opinion belongs to whoever holds it, and holding one obliges no one else.
- Whose agreement have you been waiting for?
- Whose mind are you working on lately, and what has it cost you?
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As you are
The reflection’s writer also asks about being afraid to be oneself. Read beside today’s title, letting others live may start with letting yourself.
- Where do you tone yourself down to keep the peace?
- Who lets you be yourself, and how could you do the same for them?
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At home first
Today’s reading pairs the title with Tradition Ten. The 1939 Big Book gave it first as a rule for home, between a sober husband and his wife. Read that way, the Tradition gets practiced first at the kitchen table.
- What argument at home could wait until later today?
- Who at home do you most need to let be?
Behind the words
A rule for the house
The passage opens Bill W.’s essay on Tradition Ten in the Twelve and Twelve, a page before the lines October 28 and October 29 draw on. Today’s title isn’t from the essay. It’s one of AA’s oldest slogans, and the words don’t appear anywhere in the Twelve and Twelve.
In AA’s books, the phrase starts at home. The Big Book’s chapter “To Wives,” which Bill wrote in the wives’ voice, takes up the arguments a sober husband and his wife will still have. When one turns hot, it says, either of them may cheerfully call a halt until later. A few lines on: “Live and let live is the rule.” The next chapter, for the whole family, comes back to it as one of three mottoes, after the story of a wife who nagged her sober husband about his smoking and coffee until he lost his temper and got drunk. The book puts the drink on him, and says she was wrong too, to make so much of it.
The draft had one motto fewer. In the copies of the book sent out for comment early in 1939, known as the loan copy, the chapter for families ended with two, Live and Let Live and Easy Does It. First Things First was there only as an exclamation just ahead of them. By the time the book was printed that April, it had become the first of three. Pass It On, Bill’s biography, thought it likely that the sayings came with Bill from Vermont, “old saws with new teeth.”
Bill later turned the slogans on himself. In January 1947, writing in the Grapevine on whether AA would ever have a personal government, he admitted he had once wanted to weigh in hard on every problem that reached AA’s office, and to send “hot letters” to groups he thought had gone wrong. Taking sides only split people into those who cheered him and those who called him a dictator. His older friends, he went on, remembered their own urges to “save the AA movement” from one thing or another, but their days of playing “Pharisee” were over. Easy Does It and Live and Let Live had come to mean a great deal to all of them. That, he wrote, is how each member learns that “in AA, one can be a servant only.” Six years later, a few paragraphs after today’s passage, the essay on Tradition Ten came back to the word, with elders “temporarily turned Pharisee.”
More on the three mottoes and the other slogans on meeting-room walls: Legacy, in Keep Coming Back. On who wrote “To Wives” and the copies sent out for comment: To Wives and Loan copy, in By the Carload.
Two, then three
How the Big Book’s chapter for families ends, in the copies sent out for comment and in the book as printed. From a transcription of the loan copy, and the first edition.
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Early 1939The loan copy
Right after the coffee story comes an exclamation, “First things first!” Then two mottoes.
- Live and Let Live
- Easy Does It
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April 1939The Big Book
The exclamation is gone, and three mottoes follow.
- First Things First
- Live and Let Live
- Easy Does It
Neither copy says who made the change, or why. Today’s title was in both.
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. Works Publishing, 1939; fourth edition, AA World Services, 2001. “To Wives” and “The Family Afterward.”
- The pre-publication manuscript of early 1939 (a loan copy), from a transcription. The end of “The Family Afterward.”
- Pass It On. AA World Services, 1984. Chapters 11 (who wrote “To Wives”) and 12.
- The Language of the Heart. AA Grapevine, 1988. Bill W., “Will AA Ever Have a Personal Government?” January 1947.
- Daily Reflections. AA World Services, 1990. October 30 · 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.