Keep Coming Back

Can you finish the line?

Photo by Annie Spratt on Unsplash

If you can then likely you have been to a twelve step recovery meeting. I’ve been to many and this is the way everyone I have ever attended ends.

We stand and hold hands in a circle and recite out loud the Lord’s Prayer.

At the end of the prayer, still holding hands we move them together up and down as we say, “Keep coming back, it works if you work it.”

I don’t know the history of any of this but imagine that over time the collective conscience of hundreds, possibly thousands, of broken people settled on this as the best way to end their meeting.

It isn’t in any rules I’ve read on how to conduct a meeting. It just is, and likely will continue into the future, to be the way meetings will close because it seems to express a collective vital truth, not only about how to recover from some habit or addiction, but also how to thrive and grow as human beings

And it’s so simple, just like most of the ideas critical to turning one’s life around.

That’s why it is overlooked or dismissed by those still operating their own lives for the moment reasonably well alone.

Simple profound truths are like picking a flower while walking through a field of flowers.

As the viewer focuses on the single flower,  the field of flowers blur into the background. With just a small visual adjustment to view this one flower a new fresh revelation of beauty and complexity bursts forth.

Photo by RoonZ nl on Unsplash

It’s the same for simple truths, those perhaps never seriously considered before.

So the meeting ends with the Lord’s Prayer, “Our Father…” followed by this group statement that breaks into three recommendations.

1. Keep coming back. Lives don’t change in a flash. Decisions might, but lives are a bigger more complex set of variables. This is why you must keep coming back. To the meeting? Maybe. But more importantly, to a place where you can sit, reflect, and review. Don’t wander away. Stay connected.

2. It works. There is enough evidence in the lives of others to show that we can become the people we were intended to be. There is hope for recovery. Stop searching for the unique and unusual.

3. If you work it. But there is nothing passive about improving one’s life and one’s relationship with others. It requires showing up and trying to do the best you can even if you fall down a lot.