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At a Big Book meeting the other day, I got to thinking. It was a meeting that covered pages 83 and 84 in the Big Book and the discussion was how alcoholics in recovery could attain the promises in their lives if they worked for them. I started thinking that those friends I don't see around anymore probably stopped working for the promises and eventually they were taken away. I started to go over the promises in my own head as to how they might come out if we stopped working for them. They might read something like this: If we are not painstaking about our priorities in recovery, we will fail before we are halfway through. We are going to know the old pains and the old hangovers. We will regret the past and try to shut the door on it. We will comprehend the word guilt and we will know remorse worse than before. No matter how far down the scale we have gone, we will see how our experience can take us down even further. That feeling of usefulness and selflessness will disappear. We will again have interest in selfish things and lose interest in our fellows. Self-seeking will slip back into our lives. Our whole attitude and outlook upon life will again be very dark and empty. Fear of people and of economic insecurity will return more frighteningly than ever. We will again be baffled by situations that we have begun to handle. We will suddenly realize that God can't do anything for us because we took our will back.