"Helping others is the foundation stone of your recovery. A kindly act once in a while isn't enough. You have to act the Good Samaritan every day, if need be." ~Alcoholics Anonymous, 4th Edition, Working With Others, pg. 97~

Helping others is the foundation stone of your recovery. It seems to me that we first must understand why it is that we must represent the rebuilding of something to make this recovery thing work. A foundation stone is the first stone that is placed in the foundation to mark the start of new construction.

 First of all it seems we as alcoholics have to symbolically represent our lives as something that was in need of repair or in most cases something that needed to be totally rebuilt. We represent that idea with tearing down our old lives and rebuilding anew. 

So helping others is the symbolic stone we lay in the new foundation of our lives. That is where we start. But wait! Don’t we have to work on ourselves first? Well it seems to me that we must be able to learn what it takes to help others before we can offer help.

 First of all we must understand that living life free from thinking about ourselves is paramount. If we look at helping others with the idea that it is helping us then the effectiveness is useless. Even though we may benefit from the pleasure we receive from helping others, we have to take self out of the equation. The foundation stone is laid with selflessness. 

But how is it that we act with selflessness. First of all we need to understand that self is only an imaginary image that we use to identify our being. If we become conscious of this self only being an image, then it becomes easier to live without it. It is when we use it to justify our actions, then we become selfish. That is why if you use helping others to justify your own sobriety, you are doing so in selfishness.

 The problem I have with the verse I am using for this week’s column is the fact that it says we have to act the Good Samaritan everyday, if need be. Not only should we be the Good Samaritan everyday, but it should be always. Not only when we deem it necessary.

 It seems to me that we cannot be selective in how we are helpful. If we are going to help someone who seems to have troubles, then we have to do it with no abandon. This is how we become selfless. Selectiveness breeds prejudice, we start to think about the this’ and that’s of who we are helping and how it is going to affect us, it no longer becomes effective. It becomes selfish!

 So a kindly act every once in a while does not do. We have to be effective in our helpfulness. It has to happen day in and day out. We have to bend over backwards to help someone that needs help. How do we do this you ask? Well it seems to me that practicing patience, tolerance, and being nice to other people is a start. Just smiling and being nice to someone who seems to be having problems changes their attitude a little bit. That little bit just might be enough to change their attitude about feeling better about their situation later on!!!!

 A real short story that relates to this premise. During the first five years of practicing sobriety I had to ride the city bus. This was direct result of my alcoholism, and driving record. So any way I certainly had plenty of practice in learning how patience works, and how to tolerate other people.

 Well one day about four years into this journey I was sitting at one of the bus stops that I had to catch a transfer bus to get to work. I was so adept at working this schedule that I had a monthly pass, and knew where and when I had to be. Sitting at this bus stop meant that I had to wait about twenty minutes for the transfer bus to arrive. So meanwhile plenty of other buses made their way to the stop with people getting on and getting off to transfer to other routes.

 One girl in particular caught my attention. She was extremely agitated and seemed to be looking for something. I watched her painfully get angry about whatever it was that she was missing, so I asked her if there was something I could do to help her. She told me that she had lost her monthly bus pass. She had used it to get there, but had lost it either on the bus or at the stop we were sitting at. So I asked her if she had any other way of getting to where she was going. She said “No” !!!! So I calmly offered her my monthly pass.

 She was beside herself. Why would anyone give up their bus pass to her? Well I had enough money to get to where I was going, and I could always get another bus pass. She was so thankful that she could not stop saying thank you. I told her not to worry about it. Just to remember if she ever had the opportunity to do the same, that she should not hesitate.

 It was only couple of minutes later that she settled down and was waiting for her bus to come, when all of a sudden she reached down into her sock and there it was, her bus pass. She bashfully brought the bus pass I had given her back to me and handed it back, explaining how she had stuck her bus pass in her sock and had forgotten about it. She then went on how she still could not believe that someone would be willing to help her without wanting anything else in return. I told her that was the way it was supposed to be!!!

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