The rooms

In 1935 a New York stockbroker and an Ohio surgeon, both drinking themselves to death, sat down together in a house in Akron and found that the only thing that kept either of them sober was talking to the other. Bill Wilson and Dr. Bob Smith built a fellowship out of that discovery. Alcoholics Anonymous. There are now millions of members in nearly every country, and the twelve steps they wrote have been adapted to almost every form of human trouble: drugs, food, gambling, debt, the families of addicts, and more.

The steps, in plain words. Admit you can't control it. Believe something larger than you can help. Decide to let it. Take an honest inventory of yourself. Tell someone all of it. Become willing to let the defects go. Ask for them to be removed. List everyone you've harmed. Make amends, except where it would hurt them. Keep taking inventory. Keep praying or meditating. Carry it to others.

Vault Human points to the rooms. We don't run them, and they don't need us. What I want to say about them is how much of this year they anticipated. The inventory is the log. The amends are the ledger from the first month turned outward. The daily practice is the key of the day. And the fellowship, the meeting, the person you call, is the circle that begins later this year. The rooms figured out, in 1935, that nobody gets better alone, and that the practice has to be daily, and that honesty with another person is the medicine. The research since has mostly agreed.

If this is your door, or someone you love's, there's a meeting tonight, in your town, and it's free.