I Always Have Help
Saturday Evening Post, May 21, 1960
A man who has had more than his share of trouble – alcoholism, shattered
marriage, tragic losses – tells anonymously how he manages to face life,
one day at a time.
A friend of mine recently sent me a greeting card with the title, "How to
Live in These Troubled Times," and the answer printed inside: "Keep
Breathing." If not very helpful it was at least appropriate. As I write
this I’m in as warty a financial pickle as a small businessman could
contrive – broke, no property, heavy family responsibilities, head of a
small concern which is also broke, with creditors expecting in a few
months to be paid $20,000 it hasn’t got. Less than this has driven highly
strung people to breakdown and even suicide, and I confess I am a little
uneasy. But because of a limited grasp of a philosophy which members of a
celebrated secret society call The 24-Hour Plan, I’m fairly confident of
pulling through.
Well, Now, you say, this is not so much to shout about. Lots of people
carry on through difficulties. Yes, I would reply, and lot’s of people
don’t. We have 18,000 suicides a year and 500,000 asylum inmates.
Commitments to state mental hospitals have doubled since the end of World
War II. Every day legally sane people swallow a number of tons of
sedatives and wash them down with several million gallons of soothing
alcoholic beverages, and we’re still jittery. If anyone knows of what the
ancients used to call "an ever-present help in trouble," it’s a public
duty, as I see it, to pass it along. Such a help came to me twelve years
ago. I had cracked up under pressures which are not uncommon in our
times. My wife had taken up with another man, my business was in ruins,
and I was trying to get fished out of a morass created by twenty-five
years of problem drinking. My mental state was such that I couldn’t even
ask for a job, much less hold one. I thought frequently of suicide. Then,
half-doubting and half-hoping, I took up with some people who were
supposed to know how to lay hold of a situation of this kind. They gave
me a book called Alcoholics Anonymous, and my eye fell on a remarkable
passage. Before I tell you what it said, let me assure the reader that he
doesn’t have to be an alcoholic to proceed with this article; everyone
concerned with open-minded living may find something of interest. This is
what the authors promised:
"We are going t know a new freedom and a new happiness. Feelings of
uselessness and self-pity…fears of other people and of economic
insecurity…will leave us. We will intuitively know how to handle
situations which used to baffle us. Our whole attitude and outlook on
life will change."
I decided to try it-what could I lose? Twelve years later I may ask: Do I
ever feel useless and sorry for myself? Has fear of people and poverty
left me? Do I always know intuitively what to do? Such perfection has,
alas, evaded me; but this I can say: the extravagant promise has come
true to an astonishing degree. The seemingly impossible has, indeed,
happened-to me and to many. Some 200,000 of us have known these benefits
to some extent. The foundation on which we all build is a way of looking
at life which, as previously observed, we call The 24-Hour Plan. In
essence the plan is to become aware that, if you take on the job of
living one day at a time, you’ll make it. But there’s a good deal more to
it than this; it has subtlety and paradox, corollaries and derivatives. I
suppose the best way to tell you about it is to look back over the past
twelve years and tell about some of my days.
On a cold and rainy November night I went to my first meeting of people
enrolled in the Plan. They met in a Y.M.C.A. meeting room, a basement
cubicle with cracked plaster and a single unshaded bulb. That first
evening I carried away little more than a vague impression that these
people were trying to understand what life was mainly about and to live
it by workable principles. As time went on I discovered that my first
impression had been correct. I had enrolled in a school for living, high
in it’s standards, stern beyond belief with backsliders. If you passed
your exams you were marvelously rewarded; punishment for
failure-alcoholic relapse-was self-administered and sometimes grim. There
was Harry, the handsome state cop who came around off and on, but never
seemed to grasp the main, big ideas. One day he pulled the state’s car
off the road and drew the state’s automatic out of it’s holster and blew
out his brains. There was Ed, guiding spirit of a good-sized sales
organization, urbane and capable, but clumsy with the simple lessons
taught at school. One day he took a train from New York to Philadelphia,
rode an elevator up to the top of a tall hotel and jumped off. There was
Jane, warned about the danger of brain edema, who pushed her luck too far
in an alcoholic experiment, lost her mind and never got it all back.
There were others, tragic, unforgettable, teaching vital lessons by their
failures. And there were inspiring successes. These last, I gratefully
report, were predominant.
In time, just by being around the people who were "on the program," I
began to have some ideas about why we have emotional stresses and how The
24-Hour Plan sees us through. People break down, I am quite sure, for the
same reason animals in laboratories do-too great expectations, followed
by to severe disappointments, too often repeated. The 24-Hour Plan
cushions such shocks by encouraging us to gear our hopes to what may
reasonably be expected of the day in which we find ourselves.
This brings us directly to the question: What is a day, and what may one
reasonably expect of it? Of course, our ordinary days vary according to
our involvement. Now and then, however, it’s rewarding to take a day,
strip it of all its nonessentials and get acquainted with it in its
pristine essence. A day, the dictionary says, is the period of the
earth’s revolution on its axis. One of the finest things that can happen
to a person, say devotees of The 24-Hour Plan, is really to come to know
a day.
You have to pick your time, though, and be in the mood. The best time for
me is after a period when I have had a lot to do with people and am ready
for a little solitude. It may sound strange at first, but this complete
break from people, this getting by one’s self and trying to know a day
is, to many of us, one of the essential points of the plan, high in
dividends.
I like to get up when it is still dark on the day I have chosen and watch
for dawn-the beginning. The way dawn comes is always a special and fine
excitement, too often missed. Things seem to know it’s coming; the quiet
of the night seems to deepen a little just before the first light. Then
the light changes and the pre-dawn twilight is there, a filtered
presence. I think of the great arc of light advancing over the earth and
of all the things greeting it: a forest full of birds in song, a rooster
crowing somewhere. Presently the sun breaks the horizon, rapidly clears
the earth and begins its climb.
All day I keep track of the sun. If I can manage it, I walk on a wooded
road or along a river or lake or the sea; or I drive to a distant place
where nobody knows me. I have cleared my project with my family-who
understand that apartness is as much of family life as togetherness-and
have arranged that business demands be not pressing; then I can give
myself to the day. Noon comes. At sea the navigators are watching through
their sextants; they check their chronometers and know where they are.
Sunset, twilight, dark, the moon and stars-I begin to know a little where
I am too. All the day I have not thought of people, but of earth and sun,
daylight and dark. When thoughts of people intrude, I try to choose the
people of whom I will think. I pick solitary, day-conscious people-the
psalmist lifting his eyes to the hills, from whence came his help, the
young prophet walking in the desert and encountering his destiny, the
poet considering the lake country of England, the physicist perceiving
that space is curved. All are people who have made The 24-Hour Plan’s big
discovery-that man’s rational poise is related to his awareness of time
and place, earth and sun.
Sometimes there is a great moment of full knowledge of being an earth
creature and belonging, wholly content. This delicious instant is often
reported by those who have known the plan-by any name-in depth. It may be
described as a sudden intuition that the whole of creation is offered for
you, that you are a part of a cosmic creative current, secure. One is not
always so fortunate as to know this moment on the day one has chosen. But
a moment comes when one knows it’s time for the return to people and the
hurly-burly, to see what contribution one can make, refreshed.
The 24-Hour Plan is wonderfully flexible. It encompasses whatever we may
conclude, on taking inventory in the light of our best understanding, is
the major need of that day. It provides for the rhythmic, pulsating
quality of life, the thing that Arnold Toynbee, acknowledging that one
day’s need may not be the same as another’s, called the principle of
withdrawal and return. Sometimes the difficulty is not too great
involvement with people but the opposite-too much of being by ourselves.
The plan divides life into livable, manageable, daily units. This,
indeed, was what made it so admirably suited to alcoholics. We knew that
swearing off forever was beyond us, but abstinence for a single day was
something we could manage. The principle applies to a whole catalogue of
trying situations, having nothing to do with alcoholism.
The thing most likely to ruin any 24-hour stretch, we found, are fear and
resentment. To enjoy life we had to control these plagues. We
acknowledged realistically that other people would sometimes make
mistakes and wrong us, but we could not afford to let this make us afraid
of them or chronically angry. When we tried daily to tidy up our own
behavior, sweeping out the ashes of burned-out grudges and opening the
doors to fresh opportunity, we found that perhaps they had not decisively
harmed us after all. Resentments, replaced by new interests, died from
lack of nourishment.
My twelve years on the plan have been full of emotional peaks and
valleys. Because the plan has never let me down, I have come to trust it.
I crossed the first of the valleys after the refusal of my first wife to
accept reconciliation. After my seemingly miraculous recovery from
alcoholism it was a baffling reversal of everything I had learned to
expect of her, and the justice of things. It seemed to me we had been
through the worst, that happiness was at last ahead. I loved our
children, our home and, despite our misunderstandings, I loved her. It
took me a wretched year to accept her determination to carry through a
divorce. The plan, as well as the famous A.A. prayer for serenity to
accept things we can’t change and for courage to change things we can,
saw me through this valley.
Then quite unexpectedly, I rose to one of the peaks. A neighbor woman had
a bent for matchmaking. She noted my dismal celibacy, recalled a young
divorcee who lived with her three youngsters in a neighboring suburb, and
wrote notes to both of us. I called on the young lady. It was a click
from our first meeting over a Sunday-afternoon cup of hot chocolate. A
year later we were married and ever since have known the great happiness
of marital harmony and devotion.
Happy marriage, however, cannot ward off calamity, and presently I was to
enter the deepest, blackest valley I have yet been called upon to cross.
I was careful not to allow my friendship for the children of my first
marriage, including a son, to lapse. A father’s hopes and plans for his
son-how long they incubate, even from his own boyhood, and how they hatch
and soar! One night the phone rang, and I was summoned to the hospital to
see my son after an accident. The next day he died. I cannot tell here
what I felt during the following days and months, or say much about a
lonely corridor that haunts my memory even now. But I can say that the
plan saw me through.
Meanwhile, life, irrepressible, was bear-ing upward toward another peak.
A baby was on the way. Carl Sandburg once said that a baby was God’s idea
that human life was worth while. Sandburg was right. When our little girl
arrived, even in our grief we found it good to look after the needs of
this small and charming, this needing, trusting, appreciative person.
After these heights and depths the business ups and downs seemed almost
anti- climactic. True, I coddled a whopping rage for a while when a boss
fired me because I could not share his views on local politics. I hit a
giddy peak when a new product I had concocted began to find favor with
customers. And I slumped into another valley, or at least a gully, when I
misjudged demand and wound up $20,000 in the hole.
But nothing has yet happened in these twelve years that has found the
plan wanting. If it can produce this wonder for an alcoholic type like
myself-edgy, high-strung, mercurial, headstrong, conflict-prone and
vain-what might it not do for a normal person, normally beset? It is the
lesson of my deepest heart that lets me say truly that The 24-Hour Plan,
the decision to bargain for this day alone, is an ever-present help in
trouble.
Our experience suggests that nobody can work the plan alone. Some sort of
affiliation with some human organization based on some sort of idea that
is at least global in scope is essential. We alcoholics have weekly
meetings devoted mainly to discussing ramifications of the plan. All
churches offer this primary call to the transcendent. So do many
fraternal orders. For those who mistrust creeds, organizations like the
Unitarian Fellowship bring the challenge of cosmic thought without
doctrinaire demands. Service and literary clubs often are bridges to a
realm of thought beyond the commonplace. All these groups can provide the
ingredient without which the plan cannot work-direct contact with
thinking people.
Friends can be of enormous help. When I first undertook the plan I felt I
didn’t have any. But friends appeared, and two of them-named, by
coincidence, Walter B. and Walter C.-contributed important thoughts.
Walter C. helped me to understand the rewards of just being quiet,
quoting the Chinese proverb: "Muddy water…if permitted to remain
still…will gradually become clear of itself." The more practical Walter
B. took me to task one time-when I was trying to bull through an
impossible situation-with these words: "Relax; give events a chance to go
to work on your side."
Some of my best friends in the plan have been books. Here, as with any
other kind of friend, it is individual’s choice. I have liked Conquest of
fear by Basil King, from its opening line-"When I say that during most of
my conscious life I have been prey to fears, I take it for granted that I
am expressing the case of the majority of people"-to that memorable
assertion- "The life principle is my principle; I cannot cut myself off
from it, it cannot cut itself off from me." The New Testament has some
fine statements of the Plan: "Give us this day…Sufficient unto the day…"
My wife likes Ann Lindbergh’s Gift From the Sea, with its special word
for mothers and its cry to her sex, "Why have we been seduced into
abandoning the timeless inner strength of woman?" I have found things in
John Cowper Powys’ A Philosophy of Solitude worth remembering: "People
find to their astonishment that when they drop their eternal striving and
clutching, real happiness flows in upon them in a brimming flood-the art
lies in the embrace of those elemental accompaniments of existence which
as a rule are taken so stupidly for granted."
If my account of the plan seems to emphasize calamity it’s only because
bad times always seem so much harder to manage than good. Surely we must
not end the narrative without mentioning that an important part of the
plan is watching for those small delights-"those elemental accompaniments
of existence"-which life is always tossing our way.
One morning last winter I awoke with a vague dread and discontent. The
malaise persisted most of the day. During the afternoon the weather grew
colder, and by the day’s end the temperature had fallen thirty degrees.
When I came home, my eight-year-old daughter danced and tugged at my
coattails, shouting, "Daddy, daddy, the pond’s frozen-take us skating!" I
was about to plead too tired, but we were called to the table. After
supper we all got our skates and went to the pond. The moon came up and
made the big irregular oval and its surrounding woods a glistening,
blue-black-and-white fairyland. It was a night of laughter, swift gliding
and spills-one I will always remember, and it came unexpectedly out of
nowhere.
There have been many such times. One day in late spring I heard the sound
of a steam calliope. Now, playing a calliope is to me what being
President is to some people. They are about as common where I live as
yaks are in Iowa. My musical training never extended much beyond a few
boyhood piano lessons; actually to command the instrument of the river
boats was almost beyond my daydreams. Nevertheless, there came this
haunting desire. I followed the sound a few blocks, and there at the curb
sat a man playing the great machine, mounted on a wagon. I was sure that
anyone owning such a thing would be selective about who played it. Just
the same I asked-shouting, so grand was the din-if I might try.
He smiled and nodded and moved over on the bench, and waved an inviting
hand toward the keyboard. I stepped aboard, approaching the big, hot
pipes with awe. The quivering, powerful thing now sat waiting my touch,
its tense boiler hissing. I played Farmer in the Dell over and over, the
great steamboat sounds whistling, fooping, boop-alooping over the
landscape for miles in all directions and upward God knows how far. It
was all part of the plan, and it contains a lesson-if a chance to play a
steam calliope can come t me, any good thing can happen to anybody.
" Give events a chance to work on your side," Walter B. had said. This is
no Pollyanna happy piece; some days we get nowhere, and when they’re
over, all you can say is that you’ve suffered through another day. But
even that is an accomplishment when your passing through one of the
valleys. Some things are healed only by time, administered in 24-hour
lots. Its mere passage brings one closer to that restoration that makes
it possible to begin living creatively again. Thus have people been
living their daily stints for a million years, through an incredible
variety of shifting circumstances.
Failure to hold fast to this truth has cost many a life, swept away in a
fit of temporary disappointment. A neighbor of mine, a literary man,
worked for four years on a novel, shipped it to market, then fell into
despair during the weeks of waiting for a publisher to decide. One
evening he drove his car into his garage, closed the door and started the
engine. This widow and children are now living well on the royalties and
movie rights-the book was an international success.
The $20,000 predicament described at the beginning of this article has
given me a fine opportunity to "let events go to work on my side." For a
week or so it looked like certain bankruptcy-I was obliged to "accept the
things I cannot change." Then my principal creditor decided I was worth a
gamble. He accepted a six-month note for most of the debt, providing a
new supply of 24-hour periods for me to change the things I can and for
events to go to work. On some day, presumably, it will be clear whether
the survival of our little business is a "reasonable expectation" of that
day. Either way, as long as we’re still on the plan, we’ll "know
intuitively" what to do when the time comes.
Meanwhile we’re having some fine days, one at a time. With only a slight
editing I can certify, after twelve years of testing, that the whole
incredible promise is one come true. We have found a new freedom and a
new happiness…Feelings of uselessness and self-pity…fears of people and
of economic insecurity…do not overwhelm us. We intuitively know how to
handle many situations which used to baffle us. Our whole attitude and
outlook on life has changed. And changed immeasurably for the better.
THE END
Source: Saturday Evening Post, May 21, 1960
Contact:
The Legacy Group of Alcoholics Anonymous © 2005