Getting
Started (Continued)
C:
It's kind of like making a cake. If we go to one of our great potluck
meetings, and let's say you're there, and you've made a beautiful cake--my
favorite is strawberry cake. I
take a bite of that cake, and oh man, it's good. The texture's right. The
icing is right. The moisture content is right, and it just melts in my
mouth. And I say, who made this cake? Well, you being a good cook will
probably say, I did. And I say, well, you tell me how you did it. And you
say, sure.
You'll sit
down, and you'll write out for me, a set of directions or instructions on
how to make that cake. You'll tell me the ingredients to put in it, the
amount of the ingredients, the sequence in which to mix them together, the
temperature at which to bake it, and how long to bake it.
Now, I take
your directions home in my kitchen, and I follow them to the nth degree,
to the best of my ability. When I take that cake out of the oven and let
it cool off, and
take a bite out of it, I believe I can expect it to taste exactly like
yours did.
But if I
take your directions home in my kitchen, and with my keen, intellectual,
alcoholic mind (laughter) I say, I don't believe that ought to have four
eggs, it just needs two. Or instead of two and a half cups of sugar, I'm
going to put four in it. Instead of baking it at 350, I'm going to bake it
at five and a quarter. I'm going to bake it for forty-five minutes.
When I take it out of the oven, and I let it cool off, and I take a bite of it, certainly I'm going to be biting a piece of cake. But I wonder how closely it would resemble your cake, which was my reason for making it in the first place. Now, the Big Book, "Alcoholics Anonymous" has given us a precise recipe on how to recover from the disease of alcoholism, exactly as they recovered.
If we follow it exactly as they did, then I think we can expect the same thing that they got from it, recovery from a hopeless condition of the mind and of the body. (p. 20, par. 2) Your know, there are no musts in A. A., but there's probably some things that we'll need to do if we want to recover as the first one hundred did. Joe. (See Transcriber's Note on "musts.")
