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Source: Jim K – BOX OF CHOCOLATES – 2026-08-13.m4a File: jim-k-box-of-chocolates-2026-08-13.mp3 Duration: 00:52:13
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All right. Thank you very much. My name is Jim. I'm an alcoholic. And my sobriety date is August 8th of 1980, so I just celebrated 46 years of sobriety. And yes, I got sober when I was five, you can tell. Actually, I was 17 years old. And the way to pronounce the name of my summertime hometown is Shenyang. And it is in the northeast of China, just north of North Korea. And as I was saying earlier, it's a city of 17 million people.
And there's two, two AA members who speak English, one of whom is from New Zealand. I see he is a fellow countryman there. He's in Thailand enjoying time off from his work here teaching English. And otherwise, you can find me in a little town called Waianae, which is on the western side of Oahu in Hawaii. And, you know, I credit Alcoholics Anonymous entirely for this fantastic life that I get to lead. And the reason why I sit here sober, happy, joyous, and free is because of a literature-based sobriety from the very beginning. My sobriety is rooted in the big book. You're going to hear an awful lot about the big book and a lot of other things, too, while I speak today. So, you know, hopefully that makes people happy. Anyway, I'm a third-generation member of Alcoholics Anonymous. My father's father got sober in the 1940s. My mom got sober in 1971. And at the ripe old age of 17, I crash-landed in Alcoholics Anonymous. Now, to give you a little bit of a back story, you know, my mother was one of those very firm German women. So she was very much telling you exactly what she thought, whether you liked it or not, and usually not in a very loving way. That's basically how I was brought up. And I was brought up during the 70s. And, you know, some of you are old enough to remember the 70s and how kids were basically left to raise themselves. And I was really no exception. And, you know, mainly because of the alcoholism that existed in my family. My mom and my dad split up in 1971 when my mom got sober. But before that, I would come home from school finding her passed out on the kitchen floor.
You know, and that was a reality. And my dad and my mom fought like cats and dogs. They were two very different people. You know, for those of you who remember the original Star Trek series, my mother was very much like James Kirk and my dad was like Mr. Spock. So my mom was all emotion and my dad was all intellect. You know, so you put those two together and you got me. Anyway, they split up. We moved from this beautiful house on five acres to a three bedroom apartment in town. And my mother's going to meetings, you know, all the time. And my brother, sister and I, you know, needed to have a babysitter.
So my mom's bright idea about how to find a babysitter was she'd be driving around town and she'd see some teenage girl hitchhiking. And before she would ask the girl where she's going, she'd say, would you babysit my kids? So that was the vetting process, which ended up having a bunch of Froot Loop teenage girls looking after us. And it culminated in 1974 when my mom married my stepfather. So my mom's sober about three years at the time. It's a very nice wedding at the Unitarian Church. And the reception that followed, I was seated at the table with all these teenage babysitters. And they thought it'd be a great idea to feed this 11-year-old kid Tom Collins'. And I loved it. I loved the way alcohol made me feel.
It seemed like it was the missing element in my life. I felt comfortable. I had a great time. I danced. I requested music, songs from the DJ. I had a wonderful time. At the end of it, my mom dropped me off at my dad's house. I slept on a couch. I peed the couch and I couldn't wait to do it all over again. So that's kind of like a microcosm of what took place over the course of my drinking. So I drank for effect. I was not a connoisseur of fine wines and beers. I would drink anything you put in front of me, so long as it made me feel different from the way I normally did. And that's the way I drank, all the way
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through 17. And there was a bunch of hard goods mixed in with that. I smoked pot like it was my job and all that. I don't think I've really met a pure alcoholic, and I certainly wasn't. I would take anything. So the middle of 1980 shows up. I'm graduating high school. I had to pass a certain exam, a region's exam. Most people don't know what that is, but it's a final exam for some of the science and math courses. I had to pass this exam with an 86 or better in order to graduate high school in my physics class, which was hard enough.
So I managed to not drink for a couple of weeks. I learned the entire course and I got a 91 on the exam. So I made sure that I slid in the home plate at the bottom of the ninth inning and won the game because I didn't want to have my mother give me a world of shit of not having passed a course. Anyway, I graduate. I declare it the summer of Jim. And I was drinking every day by this point. I was making good money. I was working in a nursing home from 1 to 9 p.m. every day. I was making back then, it was like 10 bucks an hour, which was a lot of money. So I made a lot of money. I had a beautiful car. I had a 1977 Pontiac Firebird and drove that thing with my buddies all over the place, all kinds of beer and a cooler in the back seat. How I didn't get caught was surprising to me, but I didn't. So the first week of August I shows up. My dad, I mean my stepfather and my mom decide they're going to go on vacation down to Long Island and I would stay in the apartment in Westchester, just north of New York City. My brother and sister were at camp so I threw parties every night in that apartment. I don't know why the cops didn't get called, but again, it didn't create enough trouble to get them called. But my buddies and I stayed drunk the entire week. The night before they come home, I cleaned that place like it was a crime scene, just like CSI, before CSI was a thing. So I cleaned that place like it was a crime scene. It was cleaner than my mother ever did. She was a leaf blower kind of a housekeeper. So that should have tipped them off when they came home that the place is like immaculate. But there was no evidence left of any of the goings on. So then I was going to a pool party that night. And the pool party started at 8 o'clock and I got there at 6 because, you know, they need help tapping the keg and all that, right? So it was my excuse to pregame the party. So 8 o'clock, I'm already drunk. I didn't leave the side of the cooler except to make room for more beer. So I stayed drunk. And 11 o'clock rolls around. And my mother had been giving me crap about getting home late. So I thought, you know what, I better get going. And I'm driving. It's about a 20-minute drive or so.
And I'm seeing things in the road that aren't there and dodging them. You know, I was flat out drunk. So I turned on to Gomer Street, which brings you into town. And Gomer Street bears off to the left at the bottom of the hill. And I didn't bear off to the left because I passed out of the wheel. And I hit a telephone pole doing about 50 miles an hour. And I smashed a windshield with my hard Irish head. But it was the very moment that I was able to connect my trouble with my drinking. Up until that time, I could never connect my trouble with my drinking. So I call that the moment of grace. It was the gift that was given to me. And thank God, I embraced it. I understood it and accepted it. And, you know, I was uninjured.
People didn't wear seatbelts back then. I certainly didn't. So I, you know, get out of the car, walk across the street. Telephone pole is laying in the street. Lights come on in the house across the street. So I knock on the door and I ask to use the phone. No cell phones back then, of course. And I called my mom up and I said, I'm on Gomer Street. I wrecked a car. I was drunk drinking. Maybe I ought to go to AA. And the stream of obscenities that came out of that woman, I don't think I've ever stopped. Finally, my stepfather grabbed the phone and said, well, where are you? And I told him where I was. So he drove out to come and get me. By then, the town cops are on the scene and they say, go sit
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in your dad's car. We'll take care of this. You know, from their perspective, nobody got hurt. It was property damage. The kids got insurance, you know, no harm, no foul. So I deserved a WI but didn't get one. And again, I looked at that as, you know, my good luck, my good fortune. So I get in the car, drive home with my stepfather to more yelling and screaming and then I finally pass out of my bed. You know, but the thing that happened overnight was my alcoholism took over all over again. And when I woke up, my mind was telling me I was too young. I made a couple of mistakes. I'll be different next time.
And I'm sure there's a few of you have actually heard that little voice in their head over and over again, no matter what took place, because alcohol was my answer. And thankfully, at that moment, my mother walked in the room with a list of names and numbers, all the family friends who were AA members. And she said, I'm not going to be your AA taxi service, your AA concierge. It is up to you to pick up the phone and ask somebody for a ride to a meeting. And to this day, I'm grateful that she told me that. My life would have been very different if she didn't. She made me work for and own my sobriety. And I'm grateful that she did that. And I, you know, picked up the phone. I called one of the guys on the list. He came over and picked me up at 630, brought me to a meeting at the Bedford Village Group, which was down the road from where Bill and Lois lived, Stepping Stones.
And as soon as I walk into the room, two young guys grabbed me. Now, it's hard to picture this now, but back when I was 17 years old, I had long, curly hair, and I had a Fu Manchu mustache, and I had this pasty white complexion like I hadn't seen daylight in years. And it's August. Everybody's got a good tan on, but me. So I kind of figured out, hey, this guy's new. So they went over to me, two young guys, Mike B. and Jimmy the Hat, and they introduced themselves, and they taught me how to identify with speakers. Now, it used to be said in AA, you should identify, don't compare. And just looking at all these Hollywood squares, we're all a little bit different, and we all have different accents and whatever, different upbringings, but we do have something in common, and that is the disease of alcoholism.
And I should try to identify, not necessarily with the circumstances, but some of the feelings that we have of the low self-esteem, the guilt, the remorse, the inability to leave it alone, the fact that when we pick up a drink, it's all, you know, it's all on. And I identified with people who were much older than myself, and I knew I was in the right place. I mean, these people drank like I did. They felt the way I did. And maybe they have something for me. Now, of course, I'd been to meetings with my mom over the years, and, you know, but I never really connected that way. So one of those guys, Jimmy, said, I'll come pick you up tomorrow night. I'm going to bring you to, you know, my home group, which was the Crow Hill Group in Mount Kisco. And that was part of the legendary cops and robbers out of New York. So these guys weren't about to pat me on the head and say, come on, Jimmy, let's get sober. But what they did was they laid out a kit of spiritual tools for my inspection, and they showed me how they worked for them. Now, you might have heard that somewhere.
It's coming right out of the big book. And these guys were big book freaks. In fact, they told me that the Twelve and Twelve was not written as a means of taking the steps. The Twelve and Twelve was a book of reflections upon the steps. The source material for getting sober is in the big book. Those are the directions. And so Jimmy gave me his copy of the big book, and we started to go through the book and go through the steps together. And, you know, that's how come I get to sit here 46 years later and enjoy this fantastic sobriety. It's very straightforward, the big book. You know, these are the directions. The book has carried that message far and wide. Bill and Bob did not go on tour to promote Alcoholics Anonymous.
The book did the job. And there's even a great story in AA Comes of Age about the Point Barrow group of Alaska and how that started. So if you get a chance to crack open that old dusty volume, you'll find it. Anyway, so my sponsor started bringing me through the Twelve Steps using the big book. And fortunately he knew, you know, the means and methods because he'd been through it himself. He was 22 years old. Sober two years. Two years before, this guy was weighing in at 400 pounds and living in a tent.
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And so we walked through the Twelve Steps, you know, and he told me that if you are a student of the Big Book, you will learn more about these steps than sitting in a meeting listening to people talk about them. He told me that Step One is repeated to us by looking at those three pertinent ideas, and everything up until How It Works is talking about the first two steps. You know, so saying those pertinent ideas really made me see, you know, I was powerless over alcohol, but my life had become unmanageable, which meant I was alcoholic and could not manage on my own life.
I certainly managed my life to such a degree that I crashed and landed in AA at 17, so I must have been doing something wrong, obviously. So, you know, the first step was not that difficult for me to understand, to get my arms around. I drank when I certainly didn't want to. The insanity of alcoholism in Step Two was something that I had to come to understand, you know. The implied insanity in Step Two is something very specific to AA. As you come to find, all spiritual books have an idiom or a language of their own.
So the word insanity in the big book isn't something you will find in a dictionary. It's something that you'll find in the context, and the context is that we cannot pick up a drink in safety. We have a mental obsession that dooms us to drink, and then, once having taken the drink, we have compulsion that dooms us to continue the drunk. So, you know, that was the path that I would follow. And one of the nice things that my sponsor did was say to me that I can be restored to sanity, and in the book it tells us that. Further on, in Chapter Six, it talks about having been restored to sanity. That means I no longer suffer from the alcoholic mind. That means I don't have to hang by my fingernails and hope I don't get drunk.
That means that serial meeting attendance is not a program for recovery. And we're blessed. Most of us can get to meetings seven days a week. But you will find yourself at a place at some point where the only thing that stands between you and your next drunk is your relationship with God. And you better hope you establish one, because that will happen for every alcoholic. There will come a time where the only thing that stands between us and that next drink is a higher power. And thankfully, I'm on a first-name basis with God, and He's present in every single day. I often say that I'm a satisfied customer and that God's crazy about me, and it's absolutely true. I have a fantastic life today because of this.
The third step was explained to me by my second sponsor, who is a great guy. He simplified it by saying, you know, he looks at the third step as a blank contract, a blank sheet of paper with the word contract at the top, and at the bottom I sign my name. And in the blank space above, God fills in the circumstances into which I shall fit. So have I signed up for the idea of God's plan for me? And, you know, I wholeheartedly say yes. I get to have this fantastic life because of it. Not because I'm particularly smart or savvy or anything else like that, but because I have followed this power greater than myself, which has brought me to fantastic places and allowed me to meet fantastic people.
Step four. And the big book is pretty straightforward, but you need somebody to really walk through it with you. You know, there are those couple of pages where they talk about the fourth step, but it's really coming down to the idea that you are making up the four lists. You're going to be writing out the list of your resentments, your fears, your harms done to others, and your sex conduct. And all of those are necessary. And, you know, you're going to sit those down on paper and look at them. And more so when you sit down with a sponsor.
So my sponsor didn't allow me to screw around with this for very long. What he said was, come to my house on Saturday morning to do your fifth step. Now this was on Wednesday. It was the Thanksgiving break. I was home from college. And he said, so yeah, come to my place, 8 o'clock Saturday morning. So I waited until midnight Friday to start writing, of course. You know, typical alcoholic, wait until the last minute. But I found that my mind went faster than my pen could write.
You know, and I sat down and I wrote out all this stuff. The worst part of the whole experience was driving to my sponsor's house. I was, I just didn't want anybody to know what was going on, really.
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Nobody knew the real Jim K.. And I purposely lived that way. And I think all of us did, to one degree or another, that we have lived two different lives. There's one we wanted everyone else to see. And then there's the real deal, which nobody should see. Those two things had to start to come together. You know, they had to be the same thing at some point. And the fifth step is where that started to happen. So I handed my fourth step to my sponsor and he handed it back to me and said, you're going to read this. And I said, really? He says, yes, you're going to read this.
But he was kind and gentle and we walked through the whole thing. He matched my experiences with his. And thankfully he did. I started to feel like I was part of Alcoholics Anonymous. That I was a sick person trying to get well, not a bad person trying to get good. And he did a great job of making me feel comfortable with that. So, you know, we do this and of course I'm like ready to move on to the steps now that I've passed this big hurdle. So, you know, here I am on step six. I'm like, whoa, when am I going to be ready for step seven? He says, oh, you'll know.
And I set about trying to remove my own defects of character, not reading through those two paragraphs about steps six and seven, but actually, you know, trying to be diligent and disciplined and all that where I had not been before. And after my defects and shortcomings beat me to a pulp, I was finally in a position where I would ask God for help. And when we read through those two paragraphs, nowhere does it say that we become disciplined, that we become diligent, that we remove our own defects. Not at all.
We had to have God's help. It tells us straight out. My willingness and cooperation is what's required in step six and seven, not my disciplined diligence because I just don't have it. I haven't been an alcoholic who does. So knowing that, you know, I go back to my fourth step and what's in the third column of every one of those entries? The word fear shows up in every single one of those. And there's a reason for that. Fear is the primary motive of all of our defects and shortcomings. Every single one.
When I'm fearful, my defects and shortcomings are raging and destroying everything in their path. Conversely, when my life is based on faith and fear is largely absent, the funny thing is that those defects and shortcomings seem to be almost gone, disappeared. They don't show up in my life. So what do I need to do? I need to work on faith. I need to understand this power greater than myself to solve all my problems, including those I cause by myself by living in my defects and shortcomings.
Step eight was pretty easy because I'd already made a list of those characters that I would have to make amends to in my fourth and fifth step. But I took the additional step of writing out all the names and why they deserved an amend. Back when I got sober, nobody put their names on the list. There just wasn't a thing. We get to benefit from the entire AA program, so I don't need to be on the list. If I want to make amends to myself, I'll do my very best at trying to live these principles.
That being said, I sat down and wrote that stuff out, and then I sat down with my sponsor and we talked about how I would make my approach. This is not an I'm sorry list. This is I'm making amends, which means I'm going to set right serious wrongs. I'm going to pay back money that I stole. I had to repair relationships with those I'd harmed. That included family. My dad's name was at the top of the list because I thought that he'd done more harm than I had done to him because he wasn't a good father. He wasn't a father's no best kind of a dad.
There was one incident when I was six years old. I was on the bus, and kids would give me crap all the time because I was younger and smaller and scared, and they would just beat the crap out of me, basically. I finally go to my dad and I said, Dad, can you help me out? The kids are really giving me crap on the bus. I need some help. He says, don't you worry about it. I'll take care of everything. I thought he was going to teach me how to fight, stand up for myself. That's not what happened.
The next morning, I get on the bus, and it makes a left on Shedene Road. Then it stops abruptly, and I know there's no pickup there. It turns out my dad pulled his car in front of the bus, stopped it, got into the bus wearing his horn-rimmed glasses and three-piece suit, and he points out to me in the back of the bus. He says, you see that kid back there? That's Jim K.. That's my son. You leave him alone, otherwise the principal's going to hear about it, your parents, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
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Then he gets off the bus, and guess what happens? It gets worse. So my takeaway from that is don't ask for help from anybody, ever, under any circumstances. I resented him for that. He was trying to do the best he could. He grew up in an orphanage during the Depression. What does this guy know? Of course, at six years old, you don't realize these things. So he was on the list. Then there was a whole bunch of family members, people I'd stolen from, blah, blah, blah, ex-girlfriends, you name it.
But we walked through all that list, and we talked about how I would make my approach. When I was drinking and 16 years old, we used to spend our summers up in Maine, and I got a job in one of the hotels as a bellhop. It was a great job for a young drunk, because we stayed drunk all the time at the summer hotel. But I got a bright idea over Labor Day weekend. You know, those chambermaids get tips every weekend, and guess what? I have a key to every single room.
So the day everybody's checking me out, I go to every single room, and I steal the chambermaid's tips. A couple hundred bucks. By today's standards, not a lot of money. Back then, it was a lot. And then I'd blow town. I had the perfect caper. And then, of course, now I got my eighth-of-night stuff to do. And my sponsor says, well, you probably can't track these women down, but you can still make amends.
He said, go get yourself a couple hundred dollars' worth of postal money orders and mail them to the head of housekeeping at the Brunswick Hotel in Ologer Beach, Maine, and ask that that money be distributed to the chambermaids, and explain why. I don't know if the money got in their pockets or if it got into this guy's hands and he just went and bought booze or whatever. I did my part. I swept off my side of the street. I owned what went on.
And, you know, the eighth-of-night stuff are kind of pivotal because you start to move out from yourself. Not only because you get to clean up the past, but you start to understand that making right serious wrongs is an important part of this experience. There were people on my list I could never find. So people I'd stolen out of their cars and stuff like that. So my sponsor said, well, pick somebody in AA who's having a hard time of it.
And you know people are just scraping by in AA. He said, why don't you just go ahead and help those people without the expectation of any kind of compensation, whatever you can possibly do for those people. My mom sponsored a single woman with four kids. Her husband split on her. She was just barely getting by. So I would go and I would fix her car and I would cut her grass and fix stuff in the house and, you know, all that.
And I would never take anything for it. And, you know, so that's the idea of service to others comes out of Steps 8 and 9. You know, thinking about somebody besides myself and, you know, that's my favorite topic, of course. Steps 10, 11, and 12 is the unshakable foundation for living and they're not extra credit. A lot of people treat them as, okay, yeah, I'll do that, you know. So thankfully I had a sponsor who really taught me about that.
So my second sponsor was a guy who taught me about Steps 10, 11, and 12. So I was sober about a little over a year and we moved from Westchester County down to Long Island. And I was introduced to a guy named Don. And Don was a union carpenter, very nice guy. And we met at the Cleary School group. It was a huge meeting on a Sunday. But he brings me over to the 12-Step Shade and he says, what are the 12 Steps for?
And he said, you know, I said, well, to recover from alcoholism, everybody knows this. Of course, I'm 18 and I'm, you know, cocky as hell. So he says, well, why don't you read Step 12. Why don't you read it out loud, read it slowly. Having had a spiritual awakening as the result of these steps. He says, stop right there. The whole purpose of our exercise here in AA is to have a spiritual awakening.
That's what we're geared up towards. And the spiritual awakening is you see things differently. You live on a different basis. You live on a God-centered basis rather than a fear-centered basis. That man became my sponsor. And he taught me the nuts and bolts of this whole idea of prayer, self-examination, and prayer, self-examination, and meditation. So he, you know, taught me about this stuff. So coincidently at this time . . .
this stuff so coincidentally at this time I don't know about you guys but I would wake up at like two o'clock in the morning and I could not get back to
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sleep because my mind would start going right I start thinking about you know how do dragons blow out their birthday candles because they breathe fire you know crap like that and we've all had those moments laying in bed like I can't get back to sleep and shut this stupid engine off but what Don taught me was your mind is a tool it's not you your your essence lives in your heart but the brain your mind is a tool and you get to be in charge of it you get to select the thoughts that you will marinate in so he said when you're laying in bed trying to figure out how to you know solve you know world hunger why don't you turn your thoughts to something like blackness something without any features and every time your mind wanders somewhere else blackness blackness blackness and you know after a while is able to fall back to sleep he said well you know now you have this thing called the discipline of the mind you get to select the thoughts that you have of course you know I was 18 years old and my idea of my morning was to be shot out of a cannon each day I would wake up at the last possible moment last nickel in my pocket last gallon of gas in my car you know you name it and I would drive off to work and drive down the shoulder of 25a to my well-drilling job and you know giving the you know salute to everybody because they're driving too damn slow and with my easy does a sticker on the back of the car mind you and slide into work couple of minutes late duck in the back door borrow some money from a friend so that I could have lunch I I ended up you know not being happy joys and free it was a tough life you know and so Don says well when you get up in the morning once you get up at like 15 minutes early so you're not having to rush off to work when you you know out on the weekends don't spend every nickel you got chasing girls put some aside so you can buy lunch for yourself don't stupid little crap like this he suggested to me so life got a lot easier you know I would fill up my car when it got down to a quarter of a tank instead of seeing how far below E you could go those little simple things made life a little bit easier so what happened Don says well now you got 15 minutes in the morning why don't you think about the day ahead what's coming at you you know life is repetitive you know you got to pay the rent on the first of the month save money towards that instead of you know scrambling at the last minute same with the other bills you know there's a lot of things that you know shouldn't take you by surprise and you have time now for the things that you couldn't anticipate and I did that and what he was doing was he was teaching me what is said from the bottom of page 85 to the end of page 88 in the big book and for you big buck scholars out there that's step 11 in the big book but the funny thing is when you read through those pages there's some really good stuff in there in that it's telling us right about inventory and prayer meditation all at once so the idea here is to develop this way of life you know so I'm not sitting there saying okay now I'm gonna do step 10 do my inventory and now I'm gonna do step 11 prayer meditation that's not how this process works at all prayer and meditation need to be interwoven together and I do that so I got to clear the channel between me and God then I can actually meditate and pray so these are things that I do every day and again like I said before it's not for extra credit of course for a western guy like me meditation was something that was foreign I thought you had to sit on top of a mountain in Nepal and say oh and that's not at all what we're talking about here we're talking about contemplative meditation that is the Christian form of meditation they're referring to when the book was written in 1939 Eastern forms of meditation were largely unknown in this country and thankfully you know that's something that works great for me I have sponsors who have a black belt meditation I certainly don't but I do have something that does work very well so you know that's something I do every single day my morning routine is here in China I wake up to the sunshine the Sun gets up here at 430 in the morning they don't have daylight savings time here so I get up it's 435 o'clock make coffee I'll go sit out on our terrace and I do a little contemplation meditation I do a written gratitude list which I just started a couple years ago when I got a new sponsor so I do that then I'll take a bike ride you know for several miles
[00:35:04]
just to keep myself in decent shape all the good Chinese food doesn't settle in around my middle and you know I look at the day and see what's coming at me you know the funny thing is is that my life will take on the flavor of the thoughts I allow my mind to marinate it and I'm no longer marinating in anger fear resentment guilt all that fun stuff that we know so well today my mind is marinating in the joy of living the fantastic life that I get to live this great woman that I got married to three years ago here in China who treats me like you know I'm far better than I really am and this opportunities for travel I retired three years ago from a fantastic career in Manhattan managing office buildings for a billionaire and this coming from a guy who never finished college I came up through the trades I'm a plumber by trade but God laid opportunities at my feet and I took full advantage of that over and over and over again the thing about meditation is it clears the mind enough that you get to hear the quiet small voice of God nudging you towards a happy joyous existence and that's what I've gotten today I get to have that so I get to be happy joyous and free now I did talk about something about literature and one of the things that I like to remind people of is that we are not supposed to limit ourselves only to conference-approved literature and it tells us that in the big book there are many helpful books also and what is that saying it doesn't say you bring your favorite book into an AA meeting but you get to use them in your personal growth and sobriety so about 25 years ago I wrote an article that got published in the grapevine called the spiritual kindergarten and the idea of the spiritual kindergarten which is what Bill called AA by the way is that we get the start of a spiritual journey here but it's up to us to grow and understanding and effectiveness to expand that spiritual awakening that we have to continue to grow and you know my daily reprieve is contingent upon the maintenance of my spiritual condition I can't forget that so when I'm spiritually fit life is good but I read a lot of other books so one of the books I read is a book called around the year with Emmett Fox and Fox was an early contributor to AA there's an article in the grapevine by a guy named Igor S from Connecticut and he talks about it it's from 1961 I think that article but he talks about the fact that the early AAs would go and listen to Emmett Fox speak in New York and and then it turns out Emmett Fox's secretary son was one of Bill's sponsees or pigeons as I like to say and so there's a real connection there so I read that book each day I've taken his seminal work which was published the year Bill got sober this is a book that he wrote called the I'm running out of gas here the Sermon on the Mount that he talks about the Sermon on the Mount and when you set the big book and the Sermon on the Mount together there's a lot of commonalities there the idea of a spiritual awakening is introduced in the Sermon on the Mount by that book so there's a lot of connection there and so I've actually run retreats on that particular book and many others too there's a lot of great books out there you know God calling is one of them the spirituality of imperfection is another there's a whole series of books that I've had the privilege of running retreats and workshops on over the years and I you know I tell people don't limit yourself be an explorer find things that work for you there's a treasure trove out there they talk about and so I get the opportunity to look through all kinds of great literature and I get to revisit books that I've read over and over again because where you are in your spiritual journey will allow you to see things that you didn't see before and that's true of the big book too you know spiritual books will talk to you at different different ways along your spiritual journey so you know that way I get to learn quite a bit I get to go back and say oh I never really saw that when did they put that into the big book and or the 12 and 12 or any one of the
[00:40:02]
other books you know as it turns out I have a sprite it's based on the spiritual fitness the literature that we have fantastic amounts of literature I don't rely upon meetings to stay sober because the people in the 1940s certainly didn't there were no meetings to go to there was maybe one or two meetings a week and whatever little town you happen to be in even when I got sober my first home group was you know a 20-minute drive away I had to make an actual effort to get to it but you know meetings are a great place to carry the message to show others how it works for you so the closest thing that I get to have for a an in-person meeting while I'm here in China and I'm here for five months and I'm about halfway through my stay is a coffee that I have with a guy from New Zealand that I meet in one of the at this big mall that's about halfway between us and Shenyang is a pretty big city so he comes from the north I come from the southeast we meet at this mall and we sit and we talk for a couple hours over coffee and you know it's the high point of my life is to sit and talk to somebody about sobriety you know he's sober six years he's about 20 years younger than me he's single you know he's got plenty of challenges but he's happy to make the journey to sit and talk to me and I really enjoy sitting with him and chatting for a while otherwise I'm doing zoom meetings and thankfully that we do half of this platform so I get to go to an 11-step meditation meeting that I started during the pandemic it's at 8 o'clock in the morning on Saturdays Eastern Time and while I'm here in China it's at 8 p.m.
China time so I get to go to it and see a bunch of my friends and it's a simple little 11-step meeting where we do a little meditation it's it's really fantastic and some people with lots of sobriety and some great shares so I get to do that when I'm in Hawaii it's a two o'clock in the morning and guess what I'm doing at two o'clock in the morning I'm sleeping at the same time I miss my friends in Hawaii there's a 7 a.m. meeting on the beach six days a week called courage to change and it's right down the block from where I live so I get to do that each day and then on Sundays I started a meditation meeting that uses the same format as the Saturday Zoom meeting and that's still going strong even without me it does not revolve around Jim K. and I hope it never does and not everybody's going to you know like what I have to say or what I have you know how I live my life and that's okay too thankfully I'm no longer a slave to worrying about what other people think about me or how I live my life because I'm very comfortable when I lay my head on the pillow I'm a sleep baby I am out and I'm not worried about what people think you know which is kind of easy here because nobody speaks English so you know you can't criticize me very much the Chinese people are super nice you know one of the things that I found out here and I came here with an open mind was the people are really nice in China you know they want what everybody else wants happy love kids family all that good stuff and and they they're super helpful super nice you know I know at no time do I feel like I'm an outsider other than the fact that whenever I'm walking around people will turn their head like you know oh really a Westerner is here because there's very few and the ones I do run into here are usually from Russia because we're pretty close to Siberia over here but you know I'm comfortable within my own skin and that's worth any amount of money being comfortable with them within my own skin God is crazy about me and always looks out for me you know when I turn to God good things happen I would have chosen a far smaller life than this left to my own devices but instead I get to have a fantastic existence all I have to do is follow a few simple rules few simple rules and if nothing else you know God has guided me over and over again I started saying a prayer about 15 years ago that I came up with and and it kind of ties into my beliefs about the third step and that prayer is God place me where I may be a maximum usiness to you my fellows in any way you see fit and I have an open mind great things come to pass
[00:45:09]
Lest anybody think that I walk on water or do any other feats, I make plenty of mistakes. I've been married and divorced. I've had great jobs. I've had crappy jobs. I've had a lot of money. I've been broke. The whole nine yards. But thankfully today I get to live this fantastic life in spite of my humanness, in spite of the fact that I get caught up in selfishness and self-centeredness on a regular basis. And thankfully I have the opportunity to step back from what I'm doing and look at it dispassionately and say, you know, is this really God's will for me or am I injecting Jim K.'s will into the situation?
Am I allowing people to be wrong? Am I letting them live their lives instead of trying to pull the strings from behind the scenes and all this crazy crap that my mind comes up with? If people want to hear my opinion of what they're doing, they'll ask me. I'm not there doing the play-by-play on their lives anymore. Jim K.'s life is a full-time job anyway, so I don't need to add to it. I'm not willing to work overtime. And I'm retired, too. I'm retired. I'm comfortable. Life is fantastic. Life is fantastic. And it may not seem that way at the very beginning, but one day at a time, good things come to those who live this way.
And no matter what goes on, we can face the difficulties of life. So some of those were my mom got drunk and died at the age of 59 after 20 years of sobriety. She drank over resentment. It was one of the most difficult things I've ever had to face. I was sober 13 years when she passed, so it's been a long time now. But I walked through it with my brother and my sister. We buried her in the family plot after we had to pool our money to do it. The house went to foreclosure. It was awful, terrible. But because of these spiritual principles, I've been able to go step-by-step and do it.
About 12 years ago, my brother was in a terrible car accident in Oklahoma. He passed out of the wheel because of his diabetes, and he hit on another car. He almost died. He had a traumatic brain injury, and he's in a nursing home in Missouri, and he's never going to come out. And his memory is damaged. He thinks my nephew is cooking breakfast for him in the kitchen and stuff like that. I still go there once a year at least to go see him, make sure he's taken care of, and I go with my sister.
And she had a very difficult time with it. And going from Hawaii to Missouri is no simple feat, but I do it. I do it not because he benefits, but because I do. And I get to be there for my sister, which has brought us closer together. And all these things are possible because of these fantastic principles that I've been introduced to. So one more quick story, and then I'm going to shut up, because I know you guys have probably fallen asleep at this point.
So I went to my very first meeting in 1971, in July. In July of 1971, I was all of eight years old. My brother and sister were away at camp, and my mom wanted to go to a meeting, so she brought me along to the Sobriety Unlimited group in Mount Vernon, New York. And Sobriety Unlimited, that meeting took place in a clubhouse upstairs. On the bottom floor was a porn shop, of course. And it was a terrible part of this town where, you know, there's drunks on the street, broken glass everywhere.
So we go there, and we start walking up this very dark staircase, and my mother says to me, now don't talk to anybody, don't look at anyone, don't touch anything, you know, the usual thing. Don't embarrass her. And so we get up to the top of the stairs, we open the door, and there's a cloud of smoke, and everybody's standing around with cups of coffee. And she says, sit in that chair over there, and there's something in the corner of the room that I couldn't take my eyes off of, and I wanted to ask my mom about it, but then the meeting started. So I sat, fidgeted for the hour, and then everybody got up and said the Lord's Prayer, and she says, all right, what do you want to ask me?
And I said, Mom, why is there a fully decorated Christmas tree? It's July. And she says, well, the people of Alcoholics Anonymous believe that sobriety is a gift, and every day is Christmas for the alcoholic who stays sober. And she was right.
[00:50:04]
So I want to thank everybody for sticking in and listening for the last 55 minutes or so, and Ramona, thank you so much for connecting. In case anybody wants to be in contact with me, there is my contact details in the chat. But thank you again, everybody, for a fantastic meeting, and thanks for listening. Thank you so much, Jim. And I hope you guys will stay around with us so you can ask questions about his adventures and all of the things in AA. I still get blown away when somebody says, oh, I came into AA when I was 15 or when I was 17. I'm going like, are you kidding me?
It was 65 for me. Come on. You guys had to live your life before you did this. But I hope you guys will join us next week where we have Lulu from St. Louis going to speak for us next week. So that ought to be an exciting time. Now, Jim, do you have a closing remark? And would you take us out with a prayer of your choice? Well, I do want to thank everybody again. And, you know, if nothing else, be honest with yourself. So let's do this. Let's have, let's say the Serenity Prayer.
God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference. Thy will, not mine, be done. Thanks, everybody. All right, everybody. I think Annette's got you loose. Now you can. Oh, good job. Thank you. Thank you so much, Kelly. Jim. Thank you, Jim. That was wonderful. Thank you. Thank you, everybody.