"No one among us has been able to maintain anything like perfect adherence to these principles. We are not saints. The point is we are willing to grow along spiritual lines."
I have known plenty of people who stay sober on meetings alone by going to six to seven meetings a week. Some of them last a very long time before they tire. Life isn't that great, there are daily ups and downs, the best you are going to feel is at the end of the meeting, and that will sustain you until the next fix, though things tend to go down hill between times. At home of course is an "an AA widow" who is not usually impressed as she is having to live with the instability of untreated alcoholism.
Doing the sort of thing I do, travelling and living in parts of the world where AA is thin on the ground would not be possible when a person cannot go two or three days without a meeting before their world falls apart, so there is not a lot of freedom in it. Hiding from alcohol, in fact hiding from the world is not a life style I would find attractive.
Living with secrets, waiting for that tap on the shoulder as some past incident catches up, too much tension and stress. Feeling different to my fellows in AA because the secrets I have fill me with shame, and make me lonely in a room full of friends. Feeling a fraud because I never really joined the program of action.
Sharing that I have not found it necessary to do the steps, how is that going to sit with anyone I try to help? Will I be a producer of harmony or confusion?
Then, back in the book it gets down to some real simple stuff. In the fifth step directions at the start of chapter six it offers the best reason for taking this step. We are liable to drink if we don't. Much the same with the ninth. I knew that would be the case with me.
Something seems to happen when we take it slowly with the steps. We start at a desperate point but life begins to get better. The pressure comes off, we lose that desperation. Steps like five look more and more challenging, the more comfortable we get. Why suffer the pain of going through it if we can avoid it? And it begins to look like we can avoid it. And maybe we can. The only way we find out otherwise is if a drink appears in our hands.
So yes we can recover by doing the steps less than perfectly, otherwise no one would recover. But there is another level of AA that not so many reach. We all get to experience the spirit of the fellowship, but not all join the fellowship of the spirit.