AA helps many souls take flight

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An article that appeared in the Toronto Star
Jun. 21, 2005 (link to the original article is available at the end of
this article)

AA helps many souls take flight

JIM COYLE

Aerodynamically speaking, bumblebees are said to be incapable of
flight.

By any reasonable standard, the world conference being held in
Toronto on Canada Day weekend should be equally impossible.

Alcoholics. About 50,000 of them. Folks who couldn't be trusted to
bring home the pay packet running a multi-million-dollar
undertaking. Folks who could scarcely get themselves to work
organizing one of the biggest conferences in this town's history.

Folks who once thought only of themselves volunteering to get things
ready for visitors from all over the world.

And doing it all without dues or fees or fundraising campaigns or
leaders or much of an organization at all.

Who could be blamed for saying that, in a logical world, it should
never get off the ground?

Yet there will be alcoholics enough in Toronto to fill the Rogers
Centre until it runneth over (three times, in fact). And, touch
wood, there won't be a lampshade, impaired charge or bouncer-issued
black eye to be seen. For they will be (or most of them anyway) as
sober as the judges who used to lock them up.

As sober, in fact, as the judges who will certainly be in their
number.

Along with butchers, bakers, candlestick makers - and people in any
other line of work you care to name.

The conference, to mark the 70th anniversary of Alcoholics
Anonymous, will more or less be a rolling series of AA meetings. In
that sense, it might be one of the larger storytelling festivals
Toronto's ever had. For what an AA meeting is, at its core, is the
telling of tales.

That's the way it began June 10, 1935, in Akron, Ohio, when a
thirsty stockbroker named Bill Wilson and a drunken doctor named Bob
Smith were put in touch with each other.

Bill told Bob the story of how he got chronically and almost fatally
drunk, then how he got sober.

What happened that day has happened ever since in AA groups all over
the world: the person passing on insight got at least as much
benefit as the listener.

With AA meetings now a staple of prime-time TV, and no cop drama
complete without an officer in wobbly recovery, the how of the
program is fairly well known.

But why it works - even when the best efforts and threats of
doctors, judges, parents, police, wives and others failed - is
something that continues to astonish even the long sober.

Of the two co-founders, Wilson was the theorist and wordsmith, the
chief author of AA's 12 Steps and associated literature.

Whatever else he had come to know about matters of medicine,
psychology and the spirit - he was by his own estimation a brilliant
synthesizer - he surely understood the power of a story.

He understood that if the essence of addiction is to isolate and
separate the sufferer from the human race, the essence of stories,
whether told between generations, cultures or individuals, is to
connect.

"We understand our lives by telling ourselves stories about what
happens to us," Susan Cheever wrote in My Name is Bill, a biography
of Wilson published last year.

Needless to say, what happens to the alcoholic is unlovely to the
onlooker and horrifying beyond imagining to the sufferer.

Alcoholism has been called a disease of perceptions, a disease of
loneliness, a disease of "more," the family disease.

Alcoholics, too, have been subject to many definitions. They are
egomaniacs with no self-esteem. They have a high threshold for pain
and a low threshold for fear. They are maladjusted to life and in
full flight from reality. They have an allergy of the body - the
overpowering craving for alcohol once some has been introduced to
their body.

They have an obsession of the mind - all other concerns supplanted
by thoughts of the next drink.

They have a spiritual malady. Spiritus contra spiritum, Carl Jung
called it. Spirits against the spirit.

What they also have, Wilson knew, is an acute ear for the sound of
someone who understands, who has known similar suffering.

Tell the person still struggling your story, instructs "the Big
Book," Alcoholics Anonymous. "If he is alcoholic, he will understand
you at once."

In the story, they hear truth. In the clear eyes of the teller, they
see something they want. In the listening, they gain the sliver of
hope that they might not be alone, that others who felt and behaved
and suffered in familiar ways have found a program for recovery that
might just work for them, too.

It is really the oldest of wisdom: that there is no substitute for
experience. That the teacher will come when the student is ready.
That example is the best - perhaps the only - way to instruct.

By Susan Cheever's appraisal, the program Wilson and Smith devised
didn't work perfectly or all the time, "but it worked often and
fairly well, which was worlds ahead of anything else that has been
thought of to combat addiction before or since."

To the millions worldwide who've found contented sobriety, that's
cause for one world-class party.

And hardly less astonishing than a bumblebee's flight.


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