04/08/2026
An R.A. member shares:
"Simple, but not easy. A price had to be paid. It meant destruction of self-centeredness."
(R.A.'s Multilith Big Book, p. 6)
There is a beautiful and humbling honesty in these words. The path is simple — the Steps are clear, the direction is given, the way has been walked by thousands before us. And yet anyone who has ever truly tried to walk it knows the second truth just as deeply: it is not easy. Not even a little.
Because what is asked is something far more radical. It asks us to loosen our grip on the very thing we have clung to our whole lives — ourselves. Our need to be right. Our need to be in control. Our carefully constructed image of who we are and how the world should treat us. Our resentments, which we nursed like they were precious. Our self-pity, which felt so justified. Our endless, exhausting habit of placing ourselves at the center of everything.
The destruction of self-centeredness is not a single moment. It is a daily surrender. It is choosing, again and again, to ask not what do I want but what does God want for me today. It is the slow and sometimes painful process of becoming less occupied with ourselves and more available to others — to life, to love, to whatever our Higher Power has been trying to offer us all along.
And here is the wonder of it: in losing that self-centeredness, we do not lose ourselves. We finally find ourselves. The real self. The one that was always there beneath the fear and the noise and the grasping. Lighter. Freer. More alive than we ever imagined possible.
The price is real. But so is the reward.
