It’s not the thing you fling. It’s the fling itself.

   This quote has been stuck in my head for several days. It’s from an episode of Northern Exposure where one of the characters named Chris builds a trebuchet catapult and wants to hurl a cow from it as performance art…he wanted to do something that had never been done before. But Chris doesn’t want to launch just any old bovine missile, he wants the “perfect” cow. After much searching he finally finds the cow he’s looking for but is then informed that he would in fact be imitating a scene from Monty Python’s Holy Grail movie where they catapulted a cow over a castle wall. His vision was destroyed, he thought he was through. But Chris was able to surrender his obsession with hurling a cow and instead decided to launch a fire-scorched upright piano from the trebuchet. Here is a portion of Chris’ speech at the piano fling…

“I've been here now for some days, groping my way along, trying to realize my vision here. I started concentrating so hard on my vision that I lost sight. I've come to find out that it's not the vision, it's not the vision at all. It's the groping. It's the groping, it's the yearning, it's the moving forward.”
 
It’s not the destination. It’s the journey.
  This is the quote that made me think of the fling quote above. It’s on the wall in our meeting room. Someone said it several days ago in a meeting. My journey in sobriety is just that, a journey. The destination matters not. It’s the groping. The reaching out blindly for the answers to my disease and finding another AA’s helping hand. It’s the yearning. The yearning to be like other people and drink with impunity, but the deeper yearning to stay sober. It’s the moving forward. Moving forward with my life armed with the knowledge that I will never again be as others. It’s the trudging on the Road of Happy Destiny, meeting and helping those like me on that same road. I may not be doing things perfectly in this program, in fact many days I’ve done the minimum. But the one thing I have done perfectly is not pick up drink. That’s the minimum, not picking up that drink. They say don’t drink, don’t drink even if your ass is falling off…and if your ass does fall off find a new way to sit down. If you’re new, welcome to
Alcoholics Anonymous. Welcome to the fling.

"The thing I learned folks, this is absolutely key: It's not the thing you fling. It's the fling itself."
        Christopher Danforth Stevens