Almost gone

AA Remote and Afloat

May 1, 2010
It is 530 in the morning and I have been awake for the better part of an hour. In a few hours we will be untying the dock lines and stepping into a new life. Everything is stowed and most of the loose ends are tied. The oddest feeling came from looking down at my key ring and realizing there isn’t a single key on it. No car, no mail box, no key to my moms or Bills car. Everything we own in the world is now confined in 44feet of floating life.
This I hope will be a corner stone of my new AA program. And it has never been more important in my recovery than now to have a program of my own. But how exactly will this work? I haven’t the foggiest but I am about to find out. From my first meeting in 1983 I have always had the quiet luxury of being surrounded with hundreds if not thousands of meeting everyday. AA went with me from Federal way to Tacoma to Covington/Black Diamond and then into “the city.” Whenever I couldn’t pull it together to have a strong program of my own I could always borrow yours. Through the love and sharing I have always found what I needed in AA.
So how is it going to work when there isn’t a meeting within hours? HOW: honesty with myself. Especially an honest acceptance that what I am feeling is OK. Excitement, happiness, grief, loss, sad mad or temporarily lost. Open mindedness: open to all those feelings and open to the program that my faith tells me will unfold around me as we travel on. Willingness: to reach out and accept a new way…until it becomes the right way.
You are going to become a part of that. Please write back when and if you can. I plan on adding my thoughts to this blog regularly but will likely only open this blog when we are near civilization. Which means my posts will likely go out in bunches and spurts. Also please pass this on to anyone you know in AA who might be interested in being part of my recovery.
In order to keep being a part of- I have a sense that I need a plan of some kind and the best I can think of is to actively work through the steps again in some kind of orderly fashion. April was Step 1.
We were supposed to leave April 1st so I have had a full month of admitting I am powerless of (fill in the blanks) and my life is unmanageable. Nothing could have been more unmanageable than this last month. Refrigerator panels more than a month late, more projects on a list we could not possibly get through, a boat that was filthy inside and out from the projects and construction all coupled with my combined emotions of excitement and grief. I lived step one this last month. My plan is to focus a step each month so today, May 1st I am diving right in to “came to believe.” I am going to need to hold on to the faith of the program: that God will restore me to sanity, that you are a power greater than me and that neither has disappeared just because I have left the dock. My recovery will never be the same…….but isn’t that astonishingly wonderful?

Kat, aboard S/v Island Bound