This is my step book. I took the picture that way in order to show that it is falling apart. The binding is broken in about five places, and two distinct chunks of pages completely come out. In pencil, inside the cover, the price of $3.50 remains. I thought this detail surely tells my age, but I see by a list from our central office as of yesterday that 12 and 12s only cost $6.40. I’m not sure, but I think only soft cover was available in our office. Mine has a hard cover, and it’s been through a lot.
I took the months of February, March, April, May and June to work through the sixth step line by line and concept by concept. I don’t really have a sense of completion, but I do feel I did a thorough enough job for this go around. Although I have spent literally years thinking about Step Six and feeling that I am ON Step Six, I never did it in this formal a way. My character defects, or at least the concept of them, come up pretty quickly in my mind when I face difficulties today. I know that this is where all of my difficulties with just about everything come from. So yes, entirely ready.
“Humbly asked Him to remove our shortcomings.”
Since this Step so specifically concerns itself with humility, we should pause here to consider what humility is and what the practice of it can mean to us.
So first, humility. One definition has to do with having a modest opinion of one’s own importance. And as word leads to word, modest means free from vanity, egotism and boastfulness. Humble means not proud or arrogant.
Humility is an important aspect of the AA program. We’re told that usually, most of us had wanted to climb to the top of the heap, or to hide beneath it. We are told to understand ourselves as a worker among workers, a family member among family members, a neighbor among neighbors.
In some deep, fundamental ways, I understand this. I work with people who have severe disabilities, and I know that each is a person, completely. Abilities between and among people vary drastically, and some are able to do many things, some only a few. The person who can walk is not superior to the person who cannot, although their ability to get around is superior. The person who can talk is not superior to the person who cannot, although their ability to communicate is better.
So yeah, I’ll take my halo in a size five. Or not. There are other times when I am very judgmental and I judge myself to be better than others. I cannot do away with the notion that people who are conservative, in religion and politics, have it wrong, and I’m right. I can work on it and I sort of do, but I just can’t imagine ever being totally over that idea. And I’m not as good as others in just about every way I can think of. I’m not as smart, I have few and pitiful talents, physically I don’t have much ability at all.
But I know the ideal I am to aim toward, which is humility and a belief that I am just a person blessed to be here now, just like every other.
