I spent the weekend at an OA retreat in the mountains near Julian, California.

In spite of being Californians, the folks there actually owned Big Books (okay, now, play nice! Don't throw things at your computer screen. It won't hurt me - it'll only hurt the screen) and a lot of them had a lot of things highlighted in their books.

But I still think I was able to bring a good bit to the table, because I tend to read my Big Book simpler than many people do - it's that whole "Black Words on White Pages" notion, of actually reading the text as though I needed to know what was in the text, not as though I were "filling in the gaps around the important stuff that I've heard in meetings and from my sponsor".

Take that word "invariably" on page 62:

Sometimes they hurt us, seemingly without provocation, but we invariably find that at some time in the past we have made decisions based on self which later placed us in a position to be hurt.

During the discussion, there were folks who deny this simple statement - they told me that it wasn't always their fault, that they didn't have a part in their injuries - that it wasn't because of any decisions that they made.

Okay, that's cool - I don't have any intention of changing anyone's mind.

However, the weirdness came up when they said "You're just interpreting it, anyway - it's just your interpretation. It's not always that way".

Okay, ma'am - I can swallow that - but just how, exactly, do you want me to interpret the word "invariably"?

Oh - uh-huh. Yeah. Okay. So then that left the objectors having to, at least, say out loud that they don't believe what the Big Book says. Cool.

But let's make sure that that's what we're saying, and not fuzzying up the words in the Big Book. Because a lot of folks have had a lot of discussions about a lot of the words in the Big Book, and - so far - nobody has made any headway in any attempt to change the wording in any real way.

And that's what I really left the retreat with - the feeling that there were folks who were reading the Big Book after they went home differently than they were reading it before they got to the retreat. And by "differently" I mean "actually reading".

Hard for that to be a bad thing, to my way of thinking.

Now I've just got to rest up from talking for so many hours, non-stop : )