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I was at a meeting the other day and someone said, “Every time I say to myself, ‘I need a meeting,’ it means I needed a meeting two days earlier.”
I was a little slow on the uptake that evening so I scrunched up my eyebrow for a minute and contemplated that phrase. I say it all the time: “I need a meeting.” It signifies to me that I have a good internal radar for when I am getting a little wobbly. Sober people get what I mean.
But I’d say if you are a normie who reads or listens to this newsletter, you probably have a similar radar for yourself—where you catch yourself getting a little fried, or more emotional, or overly frustrated with your kids or other drivers, and you know you need to do something to get yourself back on the beam. For us addicts, that means recovery stuff. For you normies, maybe that’s an Amazon purchase and a Netflix binge.
The thing that confounded me a bit was the possibility that maybe I had that phrase wrong. Is it possible that realizing you need a meeting means you waited a little too long?
That makes some sense to me. If your car has a rattle, why wait until the tires fall off to have a mechanic look at it? If your ceiling has a small leak, why wait until it caves in to get it checked out?
So the more I thought about it, the more I realized that I think that statement might be true in cases where I am feeling really squirrelly. It might mean that I waited a little too long, till my gas light was actually on.
The gas tank is actually a very good analogy here. What if the moment I say “I really need a meeting” is the equivalent of the gas tank being on “E”? I never drive any more with my car that low on gas. Once I am at a quarter tank, I’m getting gas.
My big takeaway is that that saying really made me rethink when I need meetings. The truth is, I need them almost every day—something like 4 meetings a week. That way, I never really have to say “I really have to get to a meeting,” because it goes without saying.
This newsletter is a place of joy and laughter about the deadly serious business of sobriety. So, as I will often do, let me close with a joke:
HEARD AT MEETINGS
I don’t want my ego to be the first thing people see when I walk into a room.
(Credit: AA Grapevine, November 2000, Shawn)
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