Friday, August 6, 1993. I was out at a bar in San Francisco, drinking beer, alone. I wasn’t enjoying my beers. In fact, they were making me feel worse. And I asked myself why I thought that my drinking was the result of a choice. When I got home I called the AA Central Office and got the time and location of a convenient meeting for the morning.

A homey AA saying helps me unpack my meaning. I: came; came to; came to believe. That is to say I began by showing up (came) and conforming to the practices of the fellowship. Eventually I noticed that my life had become different (came to). And I recognized the value of it (came to believe).

After I started writing this I ran into someone I knew from before he got sober. He’s 40 and has over a year now. I said he was looking good.

I approached the meeting location with some trepidation. I felt that something irrevocable lay before me– not necessarily that I would never drink again, but that I would have become someone who sought help from AA.

“It’s the sobriety,” he said. “It agrees with you?” I asked. “It agrees with me.”

I hesitated. What was my plan? I decided that I would try it for two years and after that I would consider myself free to drink again. But I also felt that my intention obliged me to participate in AA wholeheartedly. I attended more than 90 meetings in the first 90 days and made it a more or less daily practice to attend a meeting for a long time after that. I read the literature. I shared in meetings. I worked with sponsors.

I told him that was the second step. More precisely, the recognition that something good is happening is the essential kernel of the second step.

Once you see it, it is easy to believe it. “Believe” is a confusing word. It can mean to accept an arbitrary assertion without thought or inquiry. But it can also mean judgement based on experience.

In recovery we begin by going along and following suggestions. We take heart from what we hear of the experience of others. Our belief at this point is little more than an intuition that this is worth a try.

Occasionally, I reflected on the celebration I would have after my two years were up. I could cash in my miles for a first class ticket to a remote destination and get high in the sky. Until, after eight or nine months, I realized my planned celebration could be described by a simple AA term: relapse.

As we have our own experience of recovery—that recognition that something good, however subtle, is happening—our belief becomes more interior. What causes the change? We say “a power greater than ourselves” because we can’t fully explain it. I try to resist the urge to define it beyond that. The belief developed in the experience of recovery gives me the courage to go deeper into the unexplored land of sobriety.

And rather than being a mark of distinction it was a very commonplace occurrence. What WAS exceptional was the sobriety I had already achieved just by going along with it. From that moment, I was all in. I count that as the moment I took the second step fully, in my heart.