Читать книгу Conversations With Wall Street - Peter Ressler - Страница 10

Maybe it was because my drinking had grown out of control, and I could no longer hide it. It was beginning to interfere with my day job in a big way. Sometimes in the morning, I was known to have a quick nip—just to take the edge off. It soothed me until the shakes came and I needed more. Or maybe it was because I, drunk out of my mind, had taken on six guys in a bar and woke up in a pool of blood, with broken ribs and black eyes. Even more than that, it could have been that I was married now to my first wife with a six-month-old baby and did not want to become like my father - a dysfunctional abusive parent. At age twenty-six, I found myself in the rooms of Alcoholics Anonymous “counting days.” There is a saying in AA that, “In order to keep it, you have to give it away.” The belief behind this is if we help others, it helps us too. It is doubtful that I would have made it through on my own. Early in the program I met Bruce, a fellow New Yorker with a heart of gold and seemingly unlimited patience. Bruce had been a cop in one of Brooklyn’s toughest neighborhoods, Bedford Stuyvesant, before becoming a New York City fireman. He embodied the outer and inner strength I admired and helped me develop my own. When I met him, he said, “If you are willing to do the work, I will carry you for ninety days.” He ended up “carrying” me for nearly nine years.

For me, the Twelve Steps were a spiritual awakening. It jogged something in my brain from childhood. They prayed here. They asked a “higher power” to help lift the burden of their lives and find relief from pain. I found myself listening, first with arrogance but gradually with humility. In all my years of searching, this was the only lifeline I had found. These were people who had the same inner demons I had, and somehow they found a way to quiet the voices. My sobriety gave me a new lease on life, a new way to deal with all the rage I carried. Finally, I had come home. The biggest part of AA for me was I could no longer be reckless; I now had to be accountable. The Twelve Steps emphasized moral rightness. They demanded you take a personal inventory to reflect on how you treated others who you wronged and how to make amends. In every meeting, you were called to answer for your behavior. I had followed the model of my beloved grandfather whose code was the Golden Rule. But my drinking had allowed me to do things I wasn’t proud of and ponder things that made me feel ashamed. In these walls, so many others felt the same way. We were strangers tied together by circumstance. By admitting our weakness, we found our strength. It was a world where your success was mine and mine was yours. A code of the Steps was to learn how to live “one day at a time.” This meant that every day was both a challenge and an opportunity for transformation. It required me to develop a new spiritual and moral structure and gave me a foundation of personal responsibility that colored my view of the world. I had no idea how much I would need that in the life-changing events that lay ahead.