I've often mentioned that the fellowship is what drew me to AA. The steps, if paraphrased to my understanding are helpful guides to living, but to me they seem like common sense. For some, they seem to facilitate their sobriety, and as stress reducers this may be helpful. I had stress when I drank, some caused by my inability to cope, too. But in the end, addiction and alcoholism were what caused me to keep drinking. They were also the biggest stress factors in my life. Life just gets better without alcohol. Dealing with stress gets easier, as does avoiding it.
So why did I spend so many years in AA meetings without consciously focusing on the steps or devoting myself to a higher power? I would have said, I didn't need the meetings, so why was I there? I asked myself that often in the past. Frankly, I enjoyed meetings because I needed to shout out about my sobriety and happiness, and meetings with other alcoholics were about the only place I could do that without offending, boring, or looking like a crazy person to others. If I brought up just a fraction of my total infatuation with my own sobriety to people who had never been on the drunk train, I'd be written off as a loony. Well, at least weirder than people may have actually thought. But in an AA meeting, people seem to get it, and are able to accept it without judgement.
I even said in a meeting one time, that I often tried to contain myself in meetings, because I was having a love affair with sobriety, and if I let it all out, I might make a fool out of myself. I looked around the room taking an inventory, and I noticed a couple of people just smiling and nodding, so I guess I wasn't so out of step with the group. But let that much hang out in society at large, and people will think you strange.
I was at a fund raising dinner where candidates for an upcoming US Senator election were speaking. There were the usual assortment of not well known wannabes and the incumbent, all pitching their virtues and experience for the job, but there was one candidate I could not make head nor tail of. He was dressed in a clown outfit, complete with the big feet and carrying around a cluster of helium balloons stretching for the ceiling. He came to the podium with his balloons announcing his candidacy for US Senator, and his single qualification was that he was a recovering alcoholic, and this put him in a position to know something-or-other about dealing with whatever. I have no idea how he got into the place, if he was for real (I think he was), or if he really thought people would see him as an excellent choice to represent them. There was a guy who let his joy and enthusiasm get away from himself. Oddly, now that I think about it, he would have seemed even more out of place at an AA meeting.