The Light Next to My Heart

When I told Louis M. the provisional title of this interview, he asked me to change the word "day" to "moment" because sometimes things had been so hard for him in sobriety--as during one hospital stay when for a number of weeks he might have died at any second--that he experiences life as this moment of consciousness. The beauty of the Fellowship, he went on to say, is that we are always allowed to reinterpret the principles for ourselves. "Some people are dogmatic about how to work the Steps and it used to upset me," Lou said. "But I now understand that their message might be the only one that will give a path to a particular newcomer.