I only made four meetings last week.

Now, I know that there are folks who don't make that many meetings per week. I also know that there are a lot of folks who go to a lot more meetings than that. I aim at a long-running average of "more than five" meetings per week, and I actually track that on a spreadsheet (hey - it's my running log. I enter something into it at least six days a week anyway, so I just added a column which allows me to say how many meetings I went to that day. It's not a big deal :)

When Ethel and I were young (yes, it happened) we went to a LOT of meetings - I probably averaged close to two a day, right up until we got pregnant with Silas (around year five, for me).

When Ethel started to swell up with a baby inside her, I noticed that I got less interested in nighttime meetings; some ancient instinct rose up inside of me that told me that I was supposed to be at home at night; that I was supposed to come inside the cave, and put up barriers to keep the wolves and other predators away from my pregnant wife.

This bothered me a bit, for a while, until I saw that bit in The Family Afterward where it said that, for an ordinary man such as myself, a spiritual life which did not include my family obligations might not be so perfect after all. After that, Silas was born, and I fell into this habit of making at least five meetings per week.

After a while, I pulled out this habit and looked at it, consciously.

Was I going to enough meetings?

That's a good question. How to determine how many is enough? What are the criteria?

After a while, a couple of things struck me.

One of them is this - I'm not going to meetings to stay sober.

"Lemme 'splain - no, is too much. Lemme sum up." -- Inigo Montoya, from The Princess Bride

....I'm not going to meetings because I'm about to take a drink.

Ethel talks about how AAs are depicted on TV and in films; when somebody is identified in the script as being in Alcoholics Anonymous, then that person seems to always be on the verge of getting drunk; he's white-knuckling, calling his sponsor in a panic, and just barely getting to meetings before Ron Bacardi or Jack Daniels catches up to him.

That's not AA life, at all - once we get past Step Ten, it just ain't like that. At our local meetings, we sometimes read the Tenth Step promises, saying (in part):

"For by this time sanity will have returned. We will seldom be interested in liquor. If tempted, we recoil from it as from a hot flame. We react sanely and normally, and we will find that this has happened automatically. We will see that our new attitude toward liquor has been given us without any thought or effort on our part. It just comes! That is the miracle of it. We are not fighting it, neither are we avoiding temptation. We feel as though we had been placed in a position of neutrality safe and protected. We have not even sworn off. Instead, the problem has been removed. It does not exist for us. We are neither cocky nor are we afraid."

The idea of living moment-to-moment with a craving to drink is terrifying; that is NOT what we have here. It's not what we've been given, and it seems to me to be missing the point; the miracle that we've recieved is so complete and perfect that it seems just plain disrespectful to even pretend that it's like that.

I don't go to meetings because of any immediate issue of sobriety; I go to meetings to carry the message of Alcoholics Anonymous, and as long as I'm doing that, my sobriety is insured - I am immune from the first drink (if that sounds arrogant to you, then you might want to reread the first paragraph of Chapter Seven) - as I've heard it said, as long as I'm carrying the message with both hands, I won't have a hand to pick up a drink with.

So that simple distinction forces me to rephrase the question - not "how many meetings to I need to attend to keep away from a drink", but "how many meetings does God want me at to carry the message to others?" In other words, going to a meeting isn't a selfish act; it's not something that I'm doing because "I need a meeting", but instead it's something that I'm doing for the others there; it's what the folks at my first group were doing for me.

The second thing that occurred to me is this - it's none of my business how many meetings I need to be at.

I'm no longer running my own life; I'm not supposed to be figuring out what I need. My Big Book says that as long as I'm sticking close to Him and performing His work well, I'll be given what I need. I don't even have to figure it out.

I'm given instructions on how to get instructions for my daily life; I'm supposed to wake up in the morning and ask God to direct my thinking as I make my plans for the day. At that time, I find out if I'm supposed to go to a meeting today. That's allowing Him to run my life, and allowing Him to tell me what to do - on a daily basis, which is (to my understanding) the biggest block of time for which I'm going to get instructions. 

Okay, then - why do I track how many meetings that I'm going to? Doesn't that sort of contradict what I just said?

Absolutely!

However, I'm aware of my own inadequacies - no, wait. That's not true. I'm sure that I have many inadequacies of which I am completely unaware : ) - let's say, instead, that I am aware that I have those inadequacies. The Big Book says that I'm not going to do this Step perfectly, so I'm going to make mistakes.

So I track my daily meetings for the same reason that, once a week, I weigh in - not to generate any immediate alert, but just to see if I'm falling into some kind of long-term trend. If I find that I've suddenly started going to fewer and fewer meetings, then it might be time for a talk with my sponsor to determine if that is, indeed, something that God is leading me to do.

(I fully expect to start going to MORE meetings once Silas has moved out, but who knows? That may not be His plan; that just might be what I suspect is going to happen. If it doesn't, then that might be a good subject to bring up with Sponse, as well).