Before Tackling the Inventory Problem (Step Four continued)

Before tackling the inventory problem in detail, let’s have a closer look at what the basic problem is.  Simple examples like the following take on a world of meaning when we think about them.  Suppose a person places sex desire ahead of everything else.  In such a case, this imperious urge can destroy his chances for material and emotional security as well as his standing in the community.  Another may develop such an obsession for financial security that he wants to do nothing but hoard money.  Going to the extreme, he can become a miser, or even a recluse who denies himself both family and friends.

There’s something somewhere.  Maybe further along in this step?  Where we who have escaped such extremes congratulate ourselves, or something like that.  Right now, I’m looking for the “world of meaning.”  I recently went to a meeting where they discussed Step Five, and I thought then that the “exact nature of my wrongs” has changed drastically since I stopped drinking.  The “wrongs” of the active alcoholic are a world away from those of a sober alcoholic.  Thank goodness.

I’m not so much trying to understand what I did wrong between 34 and 40 years ago when I was for most intents and purposes a child of sorts.  I’m trying to understand what I do wrong now, in old age and in old sobriety.   The sex maniac and the miser aren’t ringing any bells for me.  I need to get a better handle on the low level procrastination, mid level fear, high level sloth.  These are my basic problems.  I think.

December 15, 2018 (this day)

This………month?  I think that last month is probably the first time I didn’t write here for an entire month.  Yet, everything is pretty much the same.  Seeing that I’m being a terrible corespondent I feel like looking back on the year 2018 since I probably won’t make it back here before the calendar changes.

If all goes well I will not have had a drink or drug in 2018.  I had my 56th birthday and my 34th AA anniversary.  I have been with my wife for 21 years and we have various anniversaries with that.  My children turned 33 and 30, and my daughter got married.  I’m at my same job, have my same two cats, am at my same house and AA meeting and all is well.

I have spent the past two years being shattered by politics, and I can’t say that’s gotten any better, but two of my chosen candidates did win their elections so that doesn’t feel completely hopeless.  Along those lines I spend $20 a month on the New York Times to support them and to be informed (although the article I read today was an update on Octomom, it still supports the Times).  I subscribed to The Atlantic, The Nation, The New Yorker, and I read around a bit in them.  I read We Were Eight Years in Power, Night Comes to the Cumberlands, Their Eyes were Watching God, What Happened, Barracoon, American Rust, The Audacity of Hope, Clotel, Shattered, and The Underground Railroad – all to better understand what has happened and is happening with the country.

Related to AA and my identity as an alcoholic I read The Story of Mrs. Murphy and The Lost Weekend.

I gave a small bit of money to candidates and other organizations I wish to help.

I experienced 2018 as another bonus year, one I didn’t deserve to live to see given my self destructive behavior in the past.  I spent it as a sober alcoholic, and in that I consider myself among the luckiest people who have ever lived.