(The following is a post from one of our members.)
I heard someone at a meeting share an analogy about taking a flight of steps in order to get through a door at the top. That image got me thinking.
Looking back at my history with SA, I can see that I spent years with the "crowd" that was milling around at the bottom of the steps. We went to meetings and participated in the sharing, but we didn't take the steps. We stayed below the doors just looking up the steps at the people who actually were walking up the steps. We saw people going through those doors, doors that opened to a new way of life, doors that led to serenity, peace, and freedom. But we weren't even sitting on the steps yet; we hadn't even started to trudge up those steps.
I felt good going to meetings in those early years. There was a sense of companionship being part of the crowd not yet taking the "Steps". It felt good to be with others who understood me and my obsessions and compulsions. People would listen to me as I shared about my latest failure to stay sober. In that crowd, failing to stay sober was the norm, so I felt right at home.
But it did me no good whatsoever to remain in the crowd at the bottom of the Steps and to not listen to the voice of someone who had reached the top and was offering to tell me how to take those Steps like he had. And until the pain of being me became a great enough motivator, I wasn't ready to leave the crowd. I wouldn't listen, and I wouldn't start taking those simple but hard Steps that led to freedom.
But thank God, the pain become enough, and I finally did take those Steps!
