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When I was a kid, I did a lot of baseball pitching. And I will never forget the feeling of a few times when I played at rural fields where the other team didn’t have a backstop. You could throw a curveball in the dirt and the ball would skip past the catcher and keep rolling and rolling until it stopped. It was terrifying, because you felt like you had no wiggle room.
I mention that because I have been in a cycle recently where I got to meetings on Sunday, Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday, then have had other commitments on Thursday, Friday and Saturday. I would say that four meetings per week is a pretty good rate, especially for somebody with long-term sobriety.
However, I found the frequency matters—as in, I do better when I get to a meeting every other day than if I hit a meeting every day for five days straight, then take five days off. By day three or so, I start to feel a spiritual slide.
In my case, that hasn’t meant that I ever came close to a relapse. But I just slip a little on the spirituality scale, so I find my attitude and behavior to be less than ideal. To complete the obvious metaphor, during that stretch of not making meetings, I feel like I am living life without a backstop, and it’s dicey. In baseball, not having a backstop didn’t mean I would throw one wild pitch and we would lose the game. But it meant that one wild pitch could be extremely damaging, and that the fear and insecurity of not having a backstop easily started creeping into my mind for every single pitch, which absolutely could affect whether we won the game or not. I remember having some spinouts mentally because I felt like I was all alone out there, close to one mistake with nothing to help me.
I can’t afford that in sobriety. Without connection to program stuff on a regular, consistent basis, I’m pitching without a backstop, and nobody wants that. Especially me.
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: “When I was drinking, I paid a high price for low living.”
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