Through this process in the Big Book, we’ve tapped into something we probably used to hate the sound of: humility. Some people say humility is just the ability to face facts. For a long time, we drank at problems, hoping somehow they’d change if we tried hard enough. If life didn’t go our way, we treated reality like a challenge to enforce our will.
Now we’re on a different path. Acceptance.
Some belief systems can lean toward seeing the world as a broken place that needs fixing. A lot of us lived that way too, even without religion. Everything was a project. Every person was a problem to solve. Every uncomfortable situation needed our input. But something shifts in this work. We stop trying to control life and start looking inward at what bothers us so much that we’re trying to change it.
Through this process in AA, we finally found a way to do that. Took long enough.
Humility starts to show us there might actually be a plan here. Not always our plan, which is usually where the friction starts. We become a little more okay with the fact that God didn’t stop what He was doing to ask our approval.
Turns out humility isn’t thinking less of ourselves.
It’s thinking less like we’re in charge.
What are you still trying to manage that was never yours to run?
