"We have three little mottoes which are apropos.

Here they are:

First Things First

Live and Let Live

Easy Does It."

~Alcoholics Anonymous, 4th Edition, The Family Afterward, pg.

  135~

I hear a lot of people use these mottoes pretty freely, but do we know what they are meant to represent? Let’s take a look at each one of the mottoes and see what is just right about each one of them. Oh yeah! Apropos means: Just Right!

First things first! Let’s talk about “First Things First”. Seems pretty simple to understand? Well the saying goes back a ways, and has been used by religious people for some time. It seems to me that most likely the people who wrote the Big Book liked the saying because it symbolizes priorities. Prioritizing God in front of all else is what we are talking about. Things like family and work and those things are important, but if we do not pick up the spiritual tools that God has laid out before us, then we are most likely to return to drinking and all of that other stuff really doesn’t matter any way.

Some people think that it is really a priority that we try to mend a broken relationship or marriage when we decide to quit drinking, and found how wrong they are when they tried putting that first on their list of things to do. See none of this will work if there is not some type of spiritual or psychic change in our thinking. This just does not happen over night or just because we decided to put down the drink. It takes plenty of practice at realizing this. So it seems to me that “First Things First” is get right with God, then other things will fall into place.

Now on to “Live and Let Live”. Believe it or not this phrase was coined in the First World War by troops that practiced not trying to kill one another in the trenches. They found if they did not antagonize the enemy, that at the end of the day they were still alive. These guys could usually see and hear each other and practiced not trying to do things that didn’t really need to be done. I guess you could say that there was enough killing going on, and if there didn’t need to be any more killing, then it seemed apropos.

You  could look at the way soldiers did things and apply this saying to what we all should do. We should live our own life and leave others to do the same. It seems to me that a lot of us want to be in charge of other people’s lives, that we should dictate the way they do things to make us happy. I have found that just like the actor who wants to run the whole show (How It Works pg.60), that other people don’t want their show run for them. It makes them mad and then it causes friction. All of this calamity is caused by people trying to butt into other people’s lives. It does not work!

We have to recognize that it takes a bunch of different people using their own thoughts to make up this world. That we all use different maps of thought. Instead of trying to push our thoughts onto one another, we should share them and learn the reasoning behind the thoughts of others. Our thoughts are what validate our lives no matter who we are. So if we invalidate someone else’s thoughts in lieu of our own, we in all practicality have invalidated their life. Wouldn’t that make you mad?

So just do what you think is the next right thing. Be the best you can be and let other people do what they have to do. I have found the best way to persuade someone into behaving better is to act kindly to them. If they must be selfish, then walk on!!!!

Now for the final motto: “Easy Does It”. I really and truly believe that a lot of people get the wrong idea from this motto. They believe by having the word easy in the phrase that there is no work to this thing we call “a program of recovery”. It’s just not so, the phrase was meant to not go over-board in trying to push our new found values onto other people. We must revert to the “Live and Let Live” motto to understand what this means.

Say you have finally found God and believe that with this new found faith that you are going to save all the people you once hung out with. Chances are you are going to be looked at as a crazy hypocrite and may lose any chance you might have in being helpful to someone that might need your help some where down the line.

By “Easy Does It” it seems to me that it is meant to take what you have learned from taking the steps of A.A. and apply those principles to your every day life. Not to push those principles onto others. Just live them in your life and show others by example what living a life with God in it can do!

I certainly know that “Easy Does It” does not mean that we should not read and understand the things in the Big Book that apply to the program of recovery!!!  

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