November 2024 Newest Meeting Format Plus Abridged Appendix 2

 

This version created in March 2023 and revised November 2024 from the online PDF at SHARE.   Some edits.   We include at back the shorter APPENDIX II from the website AAGNOSTICA.

As of 10/2024, this is our ZOOM meeting link Sunday 8 pm Pacific

https://us02web.zoom.us/j/9088931592?pwd=MUR1emZwZnBZV3QweXBtNGx0aXlwQT09

 

WE AGNOSTICS MEETING FORMAT

SUNDAY 8 PM  (PT)  - SHARE CENTER, CULVER CITY

 

WELCOME 

Welcome everyone.   This is the regular Sunday Meeting of the We Agnostics group of Alcoholics Anonymous. 

My name is (MY NAME) and I am an alcoholic.  (Pause)   Are there any other alcoholics here tonight?

 

AA PREAMBLE

-  Alcoholics Anonymous is a fellowship of men

and women who share their experience,

strength and hope with each other that they

may solve their common problem and

help others to recover from alcoholism.

-  The only requirement for membership
is a desire to stop drinking.

-  There are no dues or

fees for AA membership ; we are self supporting

through our own contributions.

-  AA is not allied with any sect, denomination,

politics, organization or institution ;

does not wish to engage in any controversy,

neither endorses nor opposes any causes.

-   Our primary purpose is to stay sober and

help other alcoholics to achieve sobriety.

 

 INTRODUCTIONS

We will now go around the room and around the ZOOM call and introduce our selves.

#1 - If you are at this meeting for the FIRST TIME, feel free to share where you are from.  For example, I’m Mary, I’m an alcoholic,  from Chicago.

#2 - If you are counting days in early recovery, and would like to share that, feel free to.   For example, I’m Bob, I’m an alcoholic, and today is Day 15. 

 (ROOM INTRODUCTIONS)    (ZOOM INTRODUCTIONS)

 AGNOSTICS PRE AMBLE

 The We Agnostics group has a tradition of free expression.

You can share your approach to spirituality or your rejection of it.

We neither oppose any religion nor endorse it.

[  We neither endorse atheism nor oppose it.  ]

We just want to assure each person here that anyone may achieve

Recovery in AA without being forced to accept someone else’s beliefs

Or deny their own.

 

At the end of this meeting, there is no closing prayer. 

We will count to 3 and repeat the AA RESPONSIBILITY PLEDGE,

Which will be in the Chat.

 

READING

 At this meeting we read APPENDIX 2 of the BIG BOOK of Alcoholics Anonymous.

Tonight   (NAME)  has volunteered to read it.  

[SEE BOTTOM OFTHIS WEB PAGE]

  

BIRTHDAYS  

Does  anyone have a milestone like 30, 60, or 90 days in the past week?  

Does anyone have an AA Birthday this week?

  

LEADER

 Leader shares for ten minutes.

 

 SHARING : 

 

(OPTIONAL: ZOOM BOMBER)  (Often we have many new people who find this meeting through apps.   This is a wonderful thing and everyone is welcome.  Please note that we do have a strict protocol if someone is disruptive and they will be very quickly removed.) 

RIGHT AFTER THE SPEAKER: SHARING "TIPS". 

At this meeting, we may call on those who raise there hands and those who do not.   But if you don’t want to share, that’s fine.

No cross talk.   At our meeting, CROSSTALK means questioning or arguing with or criticizing another person.   Each person will please limit your share to 5 minutes.    One person shares and then stops.  The next person shares and then stops, and so on.

 

 

OUR TIME HAS RUN OUT

NEXT PAGE….

OUR TIME HAS RUN OUT

 

Our time has run out.  We will now have 7^th tradition.   There are no dues of fees for AA membership.  But we hope you can help support AA.   Online, you can donate to support this meeting and the SHARE SELF HELP CENTER where we meet.

 

AA   ANNOUNCEMENTS

 

 Thanks to   (NAME)  for Leading and (NAME) for reading Appendix 2.

 We especially want to welcome       ( ?? NAMES … AND )        every person that is new to AA or new to our meeting.  We are happy you came and we hope to see you next week.

If you have a court card or questions, email  (email here). 

 If you would like other AGNOSTIC meetings in the Los Angeles area, see the Los Angeles AA website and search the directory with the word AGNOSTIC.  Also see the websites we listed in the Chat.

In the CHAT, there are some excellent web resources to the national Secular AA community, a monthly nationwide secular AA meeting, etc.   

We try to have the meeting open ten minutes early, both in person and on Zoom, for people to chat.

 Finally, can we have a volunteer to be the leader and do the first share  next week?

  

CLOSING

 AA RESPONSIBILITY PLEDGE

 When anyone, anywhere, reaches out for help, I want the hand of AA always to be there, and for that, I am responsible.  

#############

CHAT

DONATIONS

Please donate to support SHARE.
https://shareselfhelp.org/donate-share-the-self-help-and-recovery-exchange/

COURT CARDS

For court cards, or comments, please email 
bruce@brucequinn.com

OUR MEETING PROTOCOL

https://lasideposts.blogspot.com/2023/04/april-2023-newest-meeting-format-plus.html

The Responsibility Statement

When anyone, anywhere, reaches out for help,
I want the hand of AA always to be there,
And for that I am responsible.

MORE ABOUT SECULAR AA
https://bit.ly/secularmeetings  and also https://www.aasecular.org/  and a women's secular aa group  https://sobershedevils.com/   

Ssee also Meetings and more at this website:

https://www.worldwidesecularmeetings.com/home

For smartphones, see "MEETING APP" (w/ Chair) (iOS or Android)
You can set it to show "Secular" meetings.

Books about Secular AA include, "ONE BIG TENT" published by AA, and "BEYOND BELIEF" which has 365 days of short secular readings (not published by AA).

 

 

A SHORTER VERSION 

OF APPENDIX 2

In AA’s Big Book, the terms “spiritual experience” and “spiritual awakening” are used many times.  In the first chapters of the book, several alcoholics recover through sudden revolutionary changes.

But careful reading of the whole book shows that a personality change sufficient to bring about recovery from alcoholism can take place in many different forms. 

Sudden changes leading to sobriety can occur, but are by no means the rule.  Most of our experiences are less dramatic.  Our experience with sobriety usually develops over a period of time.

Often friends of the newcomer are aware of a difference, long before the newcomer is. The new member of AA starts to realize that a profound alteration takes place in their day to day reactions to life; that such a change could hardly have been brought about by the newcomer alone. 

##

Some members find that they have tapped an unsuspected inner resource which they identify with their own concept of a Power greater than themselves.  But other members of AA recover without any kind of belief in a higher power.

We want to emphasize that any alcoholic capable of honestly facing their problems in the light of our experience can recover, provided their mind is not closed to all spiritual concepts.  One can only be defeated by an attitude of intolerance or belligerent denial.

We find that no one need have difficulty with the spirituality of the program. The essentials of recovery are willingness, honesty and open mindedness and these have proven to be significantly helpful.

 ##

“There is a principal which is a bar against all information, which is proof against all arguments, and which cannot fail to keep a person in everlasting ignorance – that principle is contempt prior to investigation.”

 

( END )

From AAGNOSTICA, abridged

https://aaagnostica.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/11/Appendix-II.pdf

 

Additional edits 4/2023, We Agnostics Sunday Culver City.

https://tinyurl.com/aashortapp2  

ZOOM TIMERS

Zoom Apps for Timers:

• Zoom has a marketplace for apps, including some designed for time management. You can access these through the Zoom client:
  • Start a meeting and click on the "Apps" button at the bottom of the Zoom window.
  • Search for a timer app, such as "Timer" or "5 Minute Timer."
  • Install the app and follow the prompts to use it during your meeting.

April 2023: Sunday Night Culver City Abridged Appendix 2

ABRIDGED APPENDIX 2

In AA’s Big Book, the terms “spiritual experience” and “spiritual awakening” are used many times.  In the first few chapters of the book, alcoholics who recovered through sudden revolutionary changes are described.

But careful reading of the whole book shows that a personality change sufficient to bring about recovery from alcoholism can take place in many different forms. 

Sudden changes leading to sobriety can occur, but are by no means the rule.  

Most of our experiences are much less dramatic, and our experience with sobriety usually develops over a period of time.

Often friends of the newcomer are aware of a difference, long before the newcomer is. The new member of AA starts to realize that a profound alteration takes place in their day to day reactions to life; that such a change could hardly have been brought about by the newcomer alone. 

Some members find that they have tapped an unsuspected inner resource which they identify with their own concept of a Power greater than themselves.  But other members of AA recover without any kind of belief in a higher power or other spiritual concepts.

Most emphatically we wish to say that any alcoholic capable of honestly facing their problems in the light of our experience can recover, provided their mind is not closed to all spiritual concepts.  One can only be defeated by an attitude of intolerance or belligerent denial.

We find that no one need have difficulty with the spirituality of the program. The essentials of recovery are willingness, honesty and open mindedness and these have proven to be significantly helpful.

 

“There is a principal which is a bar against all information, which is proof against all arguments, and which cannot fail to keep a person in everlasting ignorance – that principle is contempt prior to investigation.”

 #######

#######

This link:  https://tinyurl.com/aashortapp2

From AAGNOSTICA, abridged

https://aaagnostica.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/11/Appendix-II.pdf

 Additional edits 4/2023, We Agnostics Sunday Culver City.

For full protocol see here:

https://lasideposts.blogspot.com/2023/04/april-2023-newest-meeting-format-plus.html

Agnostic Side Posts: How AAAGNOSTICA Shortened Appendix 2 by 50%

 

II. SPIRITUAL EXPERIENCE (ORIGINAL)

This is an abbreviated and slightly edited version of the Appendix.

https://aaagnostica.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/11/Appendix-II.pdf

 

 This blog

https://lasideposts.blogspot.com/2023/03/agnostic-side-posts-agnostica-appendix.html

The terms "“spiritual experience"” and "“spiritual awakening"” are used many times in this book which, upon careful reading, shows that the personality change sufficient to bring about recovery from alcoholism has manifested itself among us in many different forms.

Yet it is true that our first printing gave many readers the impression that these personality changes, or religious experiences, must be in the nature of sudden and spectacular upheavals. Happily for everyone, this conclusion is erroneous.

 

In the first few chapters a number of sudden revolutionary changes are described. Though it was not our intention to create such an impression, many alcoholics have nevertheless concluded that in order to recover they must acquire an immediate and overwhelming "God-consciousness" followed at once by a vast change in feeling and outlook.

 

Among our rapidly growing membership of thousands of alcoholics such transformations, though frequent, are by no means the rule. Most of our experiences are what the psychologist William James calls the "“educational variety"” because they develop slowly over a period of time. Quite often friends of the newcomer are aware of the difference long before the newcomer is aware of it. 

She or he is himself. He finally realizes that he has undergone a profound alteration has been undergone in his reactionday to day reactions to life; that such a change could hardly have been brought about by himselfthe newcomer alone. What often takes place in a few months could hardly be seldom have been accomplished by years of self-discipline. With few exceptions our members find that they have tapped an unsuspected inner resource which they presently identify with their own conception of a Power greater than themselves.

Most of us think this awareness of a Power greater than ourselves is the essence of spiritual experience. Our more religious members call it "God-consciousness."

 

Most emphatically we wish to say that any alcoholic capable of honestly facing his or her problems in the light of our experience can recover, provided he does not close histhe member’s mind is not closed to all spiritual principles. Heconcepts. She or he can only be defeated by an attitude of intolerance or belligerent denial.

 

We find that no one need have difficulty with the spirituality of the program. WILLINGNESS, HONESTY AND OPEN MINDEDNESS ARE THE ESSENTIALS OF RECOVERY. BUT THESE ARE INDISPENSABLE.

"There is a principle which is a bar against all information, which is proof against all arguments and which cannot fail to keep a man in everlasting ignorance--that principle is contempt prior to investigation." --HERBERT SPENCER

Willingness, honesty and open mindedness are the essentials of recovery. But these are indispensable.

Agnostic Side Posts: AGNOSTICA "Appendix 2" at Half Lenth

This is an abbreviated and slightly edited version of the Appendix.  202 words, half the original 400 words.

 https://aaagnostica.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/11/Appendix-II.pdf

  

The terms “spiritual experience” and “spiritual awakening” are used many times in this book which, upon careful reading, shows that the personality change sufficient to bring about recovery from alcoholism has manifested itself among us in many different forms.

 In the first few chapters a number of sudden revolutionary changes are described.

 Among our rapidly growing membership of thousands of alcoholics such transformations, though frequent, are by no means the rule. Most of our experiences are what the psychologist William James calls the “educational variety” because they develop slowly over a period of time. Quite often friends of the newcomer are aware of the difference long before the newcomer is aware of it. She or he finally realizes that a profound alteration has been undergone in day to day reactions to life; that such a change could hardly have been brought about by the newcomer alone. What often takes place in a few months could seldom have been accomplished by years of self-discipline. With few exceptions our members find that they have tapped an unsuspected inner resource which they presently identify with their own conception of a Power greater than themselves.

 Most emphatically we wish to say that any alcoholic capable of honestly facing his or her problems in the light of our experience can recover, provided the member’s mind is not closed to all spiritual concepts. She or he can only be defeated by an attitude of intolerance or belligerent denial.

We find that no one need have difficulty with the spirituality of the program. Willingness, honesty and open mindedness are the essentials of recovery. But these are indispensable.

###

In addition, in March 2023, BQ offered a few additional edits.

The terms “spiritual experience” and “spiritual awakening” are used many times in this book which, upon careful reading, shows that the personality change sufficient to bring about recovery from alcoholism has manifested itself among us in many different forms. 

In the first few chapters alcoholics who found sudden revolutionary changes are described. 

Sudden changes leading to sobriety can occur, but are by no means the rule.  Most of our experiences are much less dramatic and usually our experience with sobriety develops slowly over a period of time. Quite often friends of the newcomer are aware of the difference long before the newcomer is aware of it. She or he starts to realize that a profound alteration takes place in their day to day reactions to life; that such a change could hardly have been brought about by the newcomer alone. What often takes place in a few months could seldom have been accomplished by years of self-discipline. With few exceptions our members find that they have tapped an unsuspected inner resource which they presently identify with their own conception of a Power greater than themselves. 

Most emphatically we wish to say that any alcoholic capable of honestly facing his or her problems in the light of our experience can recover, provided the member’s mind is not closed to all spiritual concepts. She or he can only be defeated by an attitude of intolerance or belligerent denial. 

We find that no one need have difficulty with the spirituality of the program. Willingness, honesty and open mindedness are the essentials of recovery. But these are indispensable.

Have Yourself a Merry Little 2017...Bruce Handy

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/24/opinion/sunday/have-yourself-a-merry-little-2017.html


Have Yourself a Merry Little 2017
By BRUCE HANDYDEC. 24, 2016

PHOTO: Judy Garland singing “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas” in the movie “Meet Me in St. Louis.”

True, it’s not by Beyoncé or Adele or Rihanna. It’s not even by anyone still alive. But I would like to nominate “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas” as song of the year, because if any single tune reflects the miseries of 2016, and the anxious uncertainty with which we greet 2017, it is this 72-year-old holiday chestnut.

The song was introduced by Judy Garland in the 1944 film “Meet Me in St. Louis,” a picture that was itself looking further backward, to the turn of the last century. If this sounds like a Russian nesting doll approach to nostalgia, well, that’s only one facet of the song’s 2016-ness.

Like you, I’ve probably heard “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas” dozens of times since Thanksgiving, and hundreds if not thousands of times more across previous holiday seasons. (Mileage will vary depending on how much time you log at Starbucks and CVS.) With its pretty, winding, bittersweet melody, which its co-author likened to a madrigal, and its lyrics about making the best of a rocky present with hopes for a better future, this unusually ambiguous Christmas song falls on the melancholy side of the moody-merry Yuletide music divide (the so-called Guaraldi Line).

To my taste, that is the side to be on, but until last weekend, I hadn’t paid much more attention to “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas” than I had to “Rockin’ Around the Christmas Tree” or the odious “Frosty the Snowman.” The occasion was one of the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra’s annual Big Band Holidays concerts, where I found tears running down my cheeks during an especially plaintive version of “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas” sung by Catherine Russell and arranged by the tenor saxophonist Victor Goines. Introducing the song, Ms. Russell mentioned that she was going to use its seldom-sung original lyrics, and indeed they proved not only unfamiliar but also — surprising in this generally jolly context — provocative.


The most common version of the song begins:

Have yourself a merry little Christmas

Let your heart be light

Next year all our troubles will be out of sight

Instead, [this week in NYC] Ms. Russell sang:

Have yourself a merry little Christmas

It may be your last

Next year we may all be living in the past

That’s not just melancholy or bittersweet; that’s bleak, more “A Raymond Carver Christmas” than “A Charlie Brown Christmas.”

In “Meet Me in St. Louis,” Garland’s character, Esther Smith, sings “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas” to her youngest sister, Tootie, played by then 6-year-old Margaret O’Brien. (Garland, 21, was cast as a teenager and not happy about it.) The two are part of a bustling family of four young girls and one older brother growing up in St. Louis in 1903, when the city was gearing up for the World’s Fair it would host the following year. The thin, episodic plot hinges on a promotion the family’s father has received, which will require a move to New York City.

Some readers might think that a good thing, but the Smith sisters are crushed, understandably sorrowful that their lives will be uprooted, their friendships sundered, their rituals erased. Late on Christmas Eve — presumably the family’s last in its warm, sprawling, lovingly art-directed-for-Technicolor home — Esther finds Tootie still awake, worried that Santa Claus won’t be able to find the family chimney next year in New York. Esther has her own fear: that the move, just days away, will end her budding romance with the pipe-smoking, basketball-playing college boy next door. So she launches into “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas” as a balm for both her sister and herself, Garland giving the song all the magnificent ache and vulnerability she had brought to “Over the Rainbow” five years earlier.

The lyrics Catherine Russell sang at Jazz at Lincoln Center were the ones the songwriter Hugh Martin first tried to sell to MGM producers Arthur Freed and Roger Edens, who laughed when he played it for them, telling Martin, according to his autobiography, that he was “on the track of something good” but that the song “shouldn’t be a dirge.”

Martin didn’t want to compromise (he claimed he wrote the song himself, though it is officially credited to him and his partner, Ralph Blane), but Garland’s critique was even harsher than the producers’: “If I sing that lyric to little Margaret O’Brien, the audience will think I’m a monster.”

Her response may have been testy because she hadn’t wanted to make the movie in the first place, or because she was concerned O’Brien would steal the picture, or because she didn’t trust the director, Vincente Minnelli (whom she would later marry), or simply because she was Judy Garland, but she wasn’t wrong, and thus were born the more familiar lyrics, though in the movie they don’t much soothe poor Tootie: The Christmas Eve scene ends with O’Brien running into the moonlit yard and, in a fit of rage and despair, smashing the family of snow people she had built that morning — which might sound a little much, but O’Brien’s traumatized sobbing sells it. (Before scenes in which the child star had to cry, her mother would tell her her dog was being put down.)

So you can imagine how both Tootie and the audience might have reacted if the “it may be your last” lyric had stayed in the picture. Aside from turning filmgoers against Garland, it might also have traumatized them, given that “Meet Me in St. Louis” premiered in late November 1944, when the wars in Europe and the Pacific, though nearing their endgames, were far from over; the brutal German counteroffensive known as the Battle of the Bulge would begin just a few weeks later. Amid loss, separation and uncertainty, lyrics from Martin’s softened rewrite such as “Someday soon we all will be together / If the fates allow” were poignant enough.

“Not quite all, we know that,” the critic David Thomson has written of what he calls “the saddest Christmas song there ever was.” When Garland performed it at the Hollywood Canteen not long after the movie’s release for an audience of soldiers and sailors who were soon to ship out, she brought the house to tears, or so legend has it.

The Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra has used the original lyrics before, including on the 2015 album “Big Band Holidays,” so it’s not as if someone fished them out of the trunk 72 years later to make a tart postelection point. I’m also well aware that our current challenges pale in comparison to fighting a world war with civilization in the balance. Let’s say we are somewhere on a continuum between that and facing a move from St. Louis to New York. Still, I have to confess the “it may be your last” line captured my near-apocalyptic mood — and maybe yours as well.

But the lyric that moved me to tears is the line that follows “If the fates allow” (and remained in Martin’s final lyrics):

Until then we’ll have to muddle through somehow.

How prosaic, even homely as pre-rock era songwriting goes, and yet how perfect. Muddling through, somehow, may not sound particularly inspirational, but perseverance is often the best option at hand, when just moving forward, one inch or foot or yard at a time, can be a kind of heroism. At least that’s how it struck me listening to Ms. Russell, her deeply felt performance offering a subdued and cleareyed but still genuine optimism.

Is that a lot to hang on a single line from a Christmas song? Maybe. Frank Sinatra, feeling the lyric was too grim, asked Martin rewrite it when he recorded the song for his 1957 LP “A Jolly Christmas from Frank Sinatra.” Martin came up with “Hang a shining star upon the highest bough,” a line that many other performers have used since. (Josh Groban bellows it on his lugubrious new recording of the song, which just hit #1 on Billboard’s Adult Contemporary chart.) I prefer the older version, but there’s an implicit defiance in the Sinatra variant, a kind of valiant optimism — or maybe it’s go-down-swinging panache — which also suits blue-state moods this December.

In “Meet Me in St. Louis,” “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas” is the catalyst for a happy ending: Tootie’s backyard rampage prompts her father to change his mind about the move, and we cut to a dazzling climax at the 1904 World’s Fair, electric lights and handsome beaus suggesting a fine future for all. Happy endings seem a little more remote in 2016 — miles away, as they say, or at least as distant as the next election. In the meantime, we muddle through. It’s a start.
@@@
Bruce Handy is a contributing editor at Vanity Fair and the author of the forthcoming book “Wild Things: The Unchildish Pleasures of Reading Great Children’s Books.”

Marriage (NYT December 2016)

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/29/opinion/sunday/why-you-will-marry-the-wrong-person.html


Why You Will Marry the Wrong Person
By ALAIN de BOTTONMAY 28, 2016

IT’S one of the things we are most afraid might happen to us. We go to great lengths to avoid it. And yet we do it all the same: We marry the wrong person.

Partly, it’s because we have a bewildering array of problems that emerge when we try to get close to others. We seem normal only to those who don’t know us very well. In a wiser, more self-aware society than our own, a standard question on any early dinner date would be: “And how are you crazy?”

Perhaps we have a latent tendency to get furious when someone disagrees with us or can relax only when we are working; perhaps we’re tricky about intimacy after sex or clam up in response to humiliation. Nobody’s perfect. The problem is that before marriage, we rarely delve into our complexities. Whenever casual relationships threaten to reveal our flaws, we blame our partners and call it a day. As for our friends, they don’t care enough to do the hard work of enlightening us. One of the privileges of being on our own is therefore the sincere impression that we are really quite easy to live with.

Our partners are no more self-aware. Naturally, we make a stab at trying to understand them. We visit their families. We look at their photos, we meet their college friends. All this contributes to a sense that we’ve done our homework. We haven’t. Marriage ends up as a hopeful, generous, infinitely kind gamble taken by two people who don’t know yet who they are or who the other might be, binding themselves to a future they cannot conceive of and have carefully avoided investigating.


For most of recorded history, people married for logical sorts of reasons: because her parcel of land adjoined yours, his family had a flourishing business, her father was the magistrate in town, there was a castle to keep up, or both sets of parents subscribed to the same interpretation of a holy text. And from such reasonable marriages, there flowed loneliness, infidelity, abuse, hardness of heart and screams heard through the nursery doors. The marriage of reason was not, in hindsight, reasonable at all; it was often expedient, narrow-minded, snobbish and exploitative. That is why what has replaced it — the marriage of feeling — has largely been spared the need to account for itself.

What matters in the marriage of feeling is that two people are drawn to each other by an overwhelming instinct and know in their hearts that it is right. Indeed, the more imprudent a marriage appears (perhaps it’s been only six months since they met; one of them has no job or both are barely out of their teens), the safer it can feel. Recklessness is taken as a counterweight to all the errors of reason, that catalyst of misery, that accountant’s demand. The prestige of instinct is the traumatized reaction against too many centuries of unreasonable reason.

But though we believe ourselves to be seeking happiness in marriage, it isn’t that simple. What we really seek is familiarity — which may well complicate any plans we might have had for happiness. We are looking to recreate, within our adult relationships, the feelings we knew so well in childhood. The love most of us will have tasted early on was often confused with other, more destructive dynamics: feelings of wanting to help an adult who was out of control, of being deprived of a parent’s warmth or scared of his anger, of not feeling secure enough to communicate our wishes. How logical, then, that we should as grown-ups find ourselves rejecting certain candidates for marriage not because they are wrong but because they are too right — too balanced, mature, understanding and reliable — given that in our hearts, such rightness feels foreign. We marry the wrong people because we don’t associate being loved with feeling happy.

We make mistakes, too, because we are so lonely. No one can be in an optimal frame of mind to choose a partner when remaining single feels unbearable. We have to be wholly at peace with the prospect of many years of solitude in order to be appropriately picky; otherwise, we risk loving no longer being single rather more than we love the partner who spared us that fate.

Finally, we marry to make a nice feeling permanent. We imagine that marriage will help us to bottle the joy we felt when the thought of proposing first came to us: Perhaps we were in Venice, on the lagoon, in a motorboat, with the evening sun throwing glitter across the sea, chatting about aspects of our souls no one ever seemed to have grasped before, with the prospect of dinner in a risotto place a little later. We married to make such sensations permanent but failed to see that there was no solid connection between these feelings and the institution of marriage.

Indeed, marriage tends decisively to move us onto another, very different and more administrative plane, which perhaps unfolds in a suburban house, with a long commute and maddening children who kill the passion from which they emerged. The only ingredient in common is the partner. And that might have been the wrong ingredient to bottle.

The good news is that it doesn’t matter if we find we have married the wrong person.

We mustn’t abandon him or her, only the founding Romantic idea upon which the Western understanding of marriage has been based the last 250 years: that a perfect being exists who can meet all our needs and satisfy our every yearning.

We need to swap the Romantic view for a tragic (and at points comedic) awareness that every human will frustrate, anger, annoy, madden and disappoint us — and we will (without any malice) do the same to them. There can be no end to our sense of emptiness and incompleteness. But none of this is unusual or grounds for divorce. Choosing whom to commit ourselves to is merely a case of identifying which particular variety of suffering we would most like to sacrifice ourselves for.

This philosophy of pessimism offers a solution to a lot of distress and agitation around marriage. It might sound odd, but pessimism relieves the excessive imaginative pressure that our romantic culture places upon marriage. The failure of one particular partner to save us from our grief and melancholy is not an argument against that person and no sign that a union deserves to fail or be upgraded.

The person who is best suited to us is not the person who shares our every taste (he or she doesn’t exist), but the person who can negotiate differences in taste intelligently — the person who is good at disagreement. Rather than some notional idea of perfect complementarity, it is the capacity to tolerate differences with generosity that is the true marker of the “not overly wrong” person. Compatibility is an achievement of love; it must not be its precondition.

 
Romanticism has been unhelpful to us; it is a harsh philosophy. It has made a lot of what we go through in marriage seem exceptional and appalling. We end up lonely and convinced that our union, with its imperfections, is not “normal.” We should learn to accommodate ourselves to “wrongness,” striving always to adopt a more forgiving, humorous and kindly perspective on its multiple examples in ourselves and in our partners.
@@@
Alain de Botton (@alaindebotton) is the author of the novel “The Course of Love.”

We Agnostics Valley / Sunday 8 pm / Map Picture

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Agenda for Day 2, Saturday 11/12/2016, of Three-Day Agnostics AA Conference

I don't have the full agenda of the November 2016 "three day, second international,  We Agnostics Atheistics Free Thinkers AA Conference."  It was held in Austin, TX.   For a view into the types of topics and agenda items, see below.

Saturday, November 12, 2016

8:30--9:50 a.m.

               Salon F:                Yoga and Recovery - Colby S.

9:00 – 9:50 a.m.

               Main Ballroom:  What is WAAFT?? – Vic L., John S., , Nick H.

               Salon G:               The Importance of Trust in Sobriety, Russell C.

               Salon H:               All is Clouded by Desire: Chris N.

               Lonestar 2           AA Meeting - We Agnostics, Olympia, WA (Maureen M.)

               Lonestar 3           AA Meeting - We Agnostics, Lafayette, CA (Russ H.)

10:00 – 11:20 .m.

               Main Ballroom:  GLBTQ Discussion Panel: Moderator - John C.; Mikey, John L., Brooks L.

10:00 – 10:50 a.m.

               Salon F:                Freedom from Fear of coming out (as an atheist) in Traditional AA, Barry W.

               Salon G:               WAAFT Alanon Workshop - Stephen G.

               Salon H:               Women’s Meeting Workshop, Kristina J.

               Lonestar 2           AA Meeting - We Agnostics, Columbus, OH (Ed S.)

               Lonestar 3           AA Meeting - Safe Harbor, Philadelphia, PA (Liz S.)

11:00 – 11:50 a.m.           

               Salon F:                International Panel, John C., Suzanne G, Iain H       

Salon G:               The Spiritual Life is not a Theory, George M.,Garry U

               Salon H:               WAAFT, Should we change the name? Vic L., Pam W.

               Lonestar 2           AA Meeting - We Agnostics Group of AA, Indianapolis, IN (Joe S.)

               Lonestar 3           AA Meeting - Godless Heathens, Carbondale, CO (Pat Y.)

11:30 – 12:50 p.m.

               Main Ballroom: AA and the Law: Gregg O., Larry K.

12:00 – 12:50 p.m.

               Lunch

1:00 – 1:50 p.m.

Main Ballroom:  Atheists, Agnostics, Addict, Alcoholic, Ken S., Anne J.

               Salon F:                History of Atheists & Agnostics in AA, Roger C.

               Salon G:               Newcomers meeting workshop, Iain H., Glenn G.

               Salon H:               Meditation & Recovery, Chris S. David

               Lonestar 2           AA Meeting - Beyond Belief, Austin TX (Joseph M.)

               Lonestar 3           AA Meeting -We Agnostics, Dallas, TX (Emery S.)

Saturday, November 12, 2016 continued

2:00 – 2:50 p.m.

Main Ballroom:  The Use of Secular Steps at AA Meetings, Roger C.

               Salon F:                Decline and Fall of AA, Jerry F., John H.

               Salon G:               Living Cyber: Podcasts, blogs, social-media, online meetings, recovery and

                                             fellowship on the internet.

Moderator: Joe C, (Toronto) Rebellion Dogs Radio,

Panelists, Chris A, (St. Louis) Recovery Revolution Podcast

Panelist, Tammi S, (Valley Ford, CA), My Life Is A Work In Progress Blog

Salon H:               “Living Sober” Book Panel, Peter T.

               Lonestar 2           AA Meeting - We Agnostics, NYC (Deirdre S.)

               Lonestar 3           AA Meeting - Freethinkers/Atheists/Agnostics, Savannah, GA ( Mary C.)

3:00 – 3:50 p.m

               Salon F:                Women’s Meeting, Kristina J.

               Salon G:               Young People’s Meeting, Pat Y, Meagan M., Barry F.

Salon H:               Men’s Meeting,  John L.

3:30 – 5:30 p.m.

               Lonestar 1, 2, & 3             WAAFT- IAAC Business Meeting with the  

Board of Directors Meeting: Vote on a New Name, announce next WAAFT IAAC City, Ratify the bylaws, etc.

4:00 – 4:50 p.m.

Salon F:                Solutions Based Therapy, Linda S.

Salon G:               Slogans Workshop, Mikey

               Salon H:               13th Stepping, Erin G.

5:00 – 6:00 p.m.                .

               Salon F:                Traditions Meeting, Ted B.

Salon G:               Small Town AA - Courtney S.

Salon H:               Anger & Resentments David B.

Dinner on your own – explore Austin

7:00 – 9:00 p.m.

               Austin Room:                     Spoken Word, Poetry etc. Thomas B. & John H.

Waterloo Room:              Comedy Improv Workshop, Patricia T