Gotta plan?  Good for you.  Not me.  Avoid em.  My sponsor asked me once, and only once, about my goals.  “Goals?” I said.  “I don’t have any goals.  I got schemes, and I got fantasies.  I don’t know nothin bout goals.”

Maybe you’re good with that Plan B, Plan C shit, when Plan A goes all to hell.  I’m the kinda guy who will still be standin here workin out Plans F through X long after Plan A shoulda been done and over with.

Or, I set out quick just with Plan A.  Now, you planners know: it don’t hardly ever go as planned.  Not too far down the line, ya gotta “improvise,” cause whatever it was just didn’t go as planned.  When things really go off the rails, you always have the line ready: “If things happened according to my plan….”

Not that most of us need any reminder about stuff not workin like we plan it.  Some folks get used to that, I guess, and some folks like me don’t.  My sponsor used to tell me, “It’s in God’s time, not mine.”  One day I thought, “Yea, well, God’s got an infinite amount of time, and I don’t.”

Plus, I’m one of those people who puts in feelings as part of the plan: I plan to have “a good time.”  My plans would be much more realistic if I planned to have a mediocre time, if I planned to be pretty pissed off, since somewhere ahead my plan is gonna fall apart.

Nah.  Somebody like me is best off takin a hint from Tradition Nine: “Each AA group needs the least possible organization.”

Get to work.  Try not to quit or get fired, or do anything they need to call the cops for.  Get back home.  Maybe a stop or two on the way.  Hit the shower.  Lather, rinse, repeat.

There’s my plan.  There’s my goals.

If that don’t sound like a big deal, trust me, I know: it ain’t.  Some of us don’t do big deals.  When we try, we only make a big mess.  What’s your right size?  You may do a bigger deal, no sweat to you or your recovery.  So long as you remember, when you’re with us: in our thing, “there’s no big shots and no little shots; one shot and we’re all shot.”

It can be easy to forget that.  Easy to forget what size I am—til I sit in, again, with my tribe.  Sometimes, the best thing for me is when I say out loud how deranged I still am, and people in the room nod with understanding.  After all: I don’t know if I’m ever gonna get much better than I am, today, and that ain’t always that well, I can tell ya. 

Actually, it does me good, on occasion to imagine how much I could belong in a padded cell in someplace where people never visit.  And I’m out free, today.  Out of sheer shit luck, or the Will of Allah, or God’s Grace, or however you wanna call it.

Endin up in such a place was surely never part of any of my plans—or schemes, or fantasies—but I can sure see how it might happen, anyway.

Maybe you’re a planner, maybe you’re not.  Either way, if you’re one of us, I recommend you plan to sit in with our tribe—or don’t plan to not sit in with our tribe.  You don’t hafta plan to have a good time or a lousy time or a mediocre time; you can just play the odds: chances are real good sitting in will help, and even better that it won’t hurt.