Well, my name is Mike, and I'm an alcoholic. My sober date is September 7th, 1985. So I'm in the class of '85 with Charlie, and I got a sponsor in my home group, the Dignitary Sympathy Group in Indianapolis. Now that's usually just referred to as the Diggs. And that's a typical alcoholic bait and switch because we have no dignitaries and we offer no sympathy. But we occasionally catch somebody, snag somebody that's thumbing through the directory and say, "Well, that looks like that could work for me." And we get another prospect.

I'm glad to see they were able to get the extra seating in here to accommodate all of us this morning. I wouldn't presume to try and instruct you all on the 11th step here, but what I can do is share a bit of what my experience has been along the way. I need to keep track of my time here.

I'm not a guy for whom it's ever worked to be what I would call a modular step worker. I've never figured out, "Well, that's a seven-step problem and that's a nine-step problem and that's a third-step problem," or whatever. I pretty much come from a tradition where we apply the entire solution to whatever is going on in our lives. And before I understand that I'm powerless and what I'm doing to try and manage whatever is going on isn't working, I'm not going anywhere. Not much, no matter how much I pray or meditate and so forth. So it always comes back to that piece of beginning for me.

Now, I have a god of what I refer to as informed consent in my life. One of the great fears I had, before I was even deciding whether I wanted to form a relationship with this power greater than myself, was that I was going to be changed against my will into something I didn't want to be. My dear friend Don, who helped me so much, said, "Oh no, Mike. God will always seek your consent before he makes that change for you." Because I didn't know if I was going to be on a street corner handing out pamphlets or all the usual stuff, or if I'd get sent to Africa or whatever. Of course, Don pointed out that that would be better than what I was doing with my life currently. The only real problem there was a problem with my ego.

So in order to have informed consent, I've got to be willing to engage in self-examination. If I'm not really willing, on a fairly continuous basis, to examine who I am, what I am, what I'm doing, and whether it's working or not working, I'm not really capable of giving informed consent. That's why I didn't understand for the longest period of time why I'd hit my knees and sincerely pray for this and that to happen or not happen, or for this one to be healed or that one to be cast into perdition or something like that. And there didn't seem to be a great deal of results from that except, as I noted, I managed to stay sober. But it wasn't until I started engaging in this process of self-examination that things really changed.

I'll talk more about it tomorrow, but briefly, I was somebody who came here. I was the one nobody expected to ever get sober. I failed for years in Alcoholics Anonymous. People were kind to me, but they kind of put me into what I now call AA hospice or AA palliative care. They'll treat me nice, but they're not really expecting recovery. They'll try to make me comfortable while I'm dying here. And you better take note if people are treating you that way. That maybe should be a wake-up call.

I told a guy who called me the other day. I said, "You know, Mike, I allowed that people were kind to me, but they didn't seem to be pursuing me with the same enthusiasm they had in years past." And I said, "Well, there's a reason for that. They love you and certainly want the best for you and everything else, but their little triage has put you at the end of the line as not likely to recover. So some of the people showing more interest and taking some of these actions are getting more of their attention and focus right now. They'll be kind to you, but there are a lot of people who have just formed the opinion, based on their experience, that you're probably not willing to recover from alcoholism. And you might want to pay attention to that."

The miracle happened, and I did get sober. I went into Alcoholics Anonymous with a passion I'd never imagined I'd be able to muster. I went through what I call my junior guru phase in Alcoholics Anonymous. Eleven meetings a week, and of course I had to found my own meeting. There had to be at least one meeting in the city where they did it exactly right. And you can't be a guru without your own meeting. And it's kind of a signature thing.

I get a new career and I get a new wife and a new family. I get the whole package, and it was handed to me. Very much like others have mentioned, I found myself five years away from a drink, not having any desire to have a drink, but seriously considering suicide like I'd never considered it when I was drinking. Because I found a hopelessness in sobriety that I'd never found in the bottle. As long as I was drinking, I could always cling to that thread of hope that someday, somehow, I'd get sober and then it seemed like things would be okay.

But here I am. I'm five years away from a drink, I got the smile plastered on my face, and I'm sitting there at the front of my little junior guru meeting, doing all this stuff, pretending to sponsor people and all this kind of stuff. But inside, I'm dying.

It turned out the reason I'm dying is because I did hear an Alcoholics Anonymous approximately what I did when I went to the University of Iowa years ago. I went over to the fieldhouse, registered for classes, went down to the bookstore, and I bought all my books. I joined a fraternity, threw the books in the closet, and I started partying. If you came up to me on campus and asked me what I was doing, I'd say, "Well, sir, I'm a pre-law student here at the University of Iowa." And that's technically true, except I wasn't going to class much.

That's what I was doing in Alcoholics Anonymous. I didn't miss a meeting. I didn't miss a dance. I didn't miss a convention or a roundup or any of that stuff. I was right there front and center. But I was almost completely unmarked by the step work in Alcoholics Anonymous. To the extent I had a program, it was a collection of slogans and what I call bumper stickers.

I just sling one of those bumper stickers at you. There's a gal who celebrated 30 years this month who likes to remind me that I was attempting to sponsor her abusive husband. This guy comes by and terrifies her and the children and one thing and another. And I can't believe it, but it's true. I had the absolute nerve to look at her and tell her, "Well, you just needed to turn that over." I mean, can you imagine? I'm lucky they let me live. But I didn't know any better.

I've lived a life of good intentions. I'm not a sociopath. I'm not a psychopath. What happened to me in the end was that the way I was living, I could break your rules and I could break your heart, but I finally broke my own. And when I broke my own, I couldn't continue anymore. As long as I was breaking your rules, I could just say, "Well, learn to live with it." That's a cleaned-up version, by the way.

Further from a drink than I ever expected to be, I was lucky. I fell in with step workers here in Alcoholic Anonymous. A guy who ended up in Indianapolis out of Denver, a young people's group, who I cordially hated for many years, probably because I sensed he had something I didn't have. I came into contact with a man in Colorado by the name of Don that some of you may know. That man changed my life, and all of them really, out of that whole family.

I've had a lovely time connecting with Charlie and Katie and others this weekend who came out of that. We're kind of all part of a big family. Don used to say, "We're all one big family, but within that family, there are a lot of kissing cousins and then we got immediate family." Charlie and Katie, for example, are immediate family here.

Don didn't tell me what to do. As a matter of fact, he would do things with me. He talked about keeping his sword sharp so he could puncture that ego of mine and deal with those old ideas. So it wasn't so much what Don told me, it was the questions he asked me. He would tell me, "Mike, if we can get to the right question, you'll know the answer because you've got a good heart."

It's been a process, still to this day, of getting me to the right question. I'll tell you how that works. Not that long ago, a couple years ago, I left my office. I wanted to go over to our local little upscale mall and do some power shopping at noon. I was running a bit behind. So as I approached the intersection to enter that place, the light was kind of turning a little bit. And so I just floored it and went through the intersection. It was maybe a little pink when I went through.

I go through the intersection and I'm looking in my rearview mirror, and I'll be damned, there's this guy in a green minivan behind me and he's on my bumper. So I'm looking around and find a parking place. I look back, and there's the green minivan still behind me. I know what to do. I find a parking place. I'm an old street fighter, so I know you never let them catch you sitting in the car. I parked that car. I'm out of the car, and he had to park a few spaces away because of the way the lot was laid out. He came around the back end of that minivan, and I'm there. I'm ready for whatever is coming.

That man looked at me and he says, "Well, mister, would you mind stepping over here and telling my little girl why risking her life and safety was worth you getting that parking place a couple minutes earlier than you would have otherwise?" He asked me the right question. It never even occurred to me.

See, I'm not a sociopath. I'm not a psychopath. If you ask me the question, "Would you risk a child's life in order to get a parking place?" Of course not. But I'm spiritually blind, so I never even see that. I just see my agenda. I'm in a hurry. I need to get there, and I don't mean anybody any harm.

That's the way I'm living my life. And thanks to our tenth step, I can promptly clean that up with him. We have a lot of discussion at the meetings I go to about how this tenth step business is supposed to be our end-of-the-night review. That's what I do before I go to bed. I'm sorry, but it's not that way where we are in our home group.

I love the way we practice this in my home group because we actually managed to take this and turn it into a twelve-step tool. Here's how that works. We have twelve tenth-step circles there in our home group, and we make sure that we have old-timers paired with the newest people. So when I did that bonehead thing there in the parking lot, guess what? I gotta call the newest guy I'm working with and say, "Guess what your sponsor did this morning?" What that is, it's not us. We can talk in the meetings about what we need to do, but when we make a demonstration of that, when we actually take this out on the street and live our lives, it becomes an entirely different proposition.

That's the way it was for me with that old-timer that I started out hating. I remembered I was just the newest guy at that group, and he came up to me after a bunch of us had had lunch one day. He said, "Mike, can I talk to you for a minute? I was at work this morning. He was working in a sales job at that time. Some people came in to buy a high-end audiovisual system. I wrote it up on my ticket and everything else. They'd been working for a period of time with another salesman who was off that day, and I took the sale for myself. Here's what I'm going to do about it. I got to go back and talk to the boss and set that right and everything else. This is bad for the morale of the other people here." And then he gave me the golden piece of this, the often forgotten piece. It's not just about confession. He said, "Before we go to the meeting tonight, would you want to meet me down at detox and maybe we can find a couple of drunks to talk to?" We turn our thoughts to others that we can help.

As we look through that tenth step, all the adjectives they use to describe that—at once, immediately, right now—the whole thing, there's nothing about later. The way they put that to me, they said, "Mike, if I was out walking my dog and I came by your yard and my dog did his business in your yard, would you want me to walk up to you and say, 'Well, Mike, you'll be happy to know we got a spiritual step that I'm going to think about this, and later tonight, if I decide this is troubling me, I may come up and pick that mess up out of your yard'? In fact, if I don't do that properly, I've probably increased the harm I've done you, haven't I?"

So the spiritual life I've learned is the life of the present. It's the life of the here and now, not the here and next. At once, immediately, right now. And then we can use this as a way to take those people who feel like outsiders when they come to our meeting, who don't feel like they quite belong yet, who see this bunch of old-timers sitting over here who know everything and all that kind of stuff. We can bring them right into the fold. They're participating members right from the get-go. It's a beautiful thing to see.

Carry touched on it last night. What wonderful promises. I think those tenth-step promises are every bit as bright as those ninth-step promises. And then we get to move on in with that, and we get a way of life that we're going to start practicing for our lifetime.

Part of the beginning, when I would go talk to Don, I remember I'll give you a couple snapshots out of that. I'd ask Don about something I'd done or whatever, and he'd say, "Well, I remember the day. Mike, as near as I can tell, in the beginning, God created you in his image, and you've been trying to return the favor ever since." And that really ends up being the problem, doesn't it? I keep imagining and thinking God in my image. If I'd be angry, I'm sure God's angry. If I'd be this, I'm sure, you know. What have I done, you know?

One of the beautiful things that he told me is I kept pressing him. "Tell me about your God. Tell me about how this works for you." He would tell me in a kind of a very general way, but he would never get terribly specific about it. I finally started to get to know each other. "Come on, give it up. Tell me, you know." And he says, "Well, Mike, no. I'm not going to do that. Because you're a spiritual thief. If I tell you exactly how it is for me, all you'll do is try and duplicate my experience, and you'll never have your own experience, and you'll have robbed yourself."

That "at once and immediately and everything else" had a more direct meaning than it did in 2007. I was fortunate beyond my dreams to have a woman that I couldn't imagine ever wanting to have anything to do with me fall in love with me. I didn't have anything to do with it. Don said that's why it was extra good.

Much like Charlie and Katie, we were friends for a long time, and I knew her husband well. They were both good friends, and we knew each other for fourteen years. Richard got pancreatic cancer in 2000 and died within a couple of months. It was a horrible disease. It just ate him alive. We all continued to do AA together and everything else.

Several years later, Linda and I did a workshop for a group on a Saturday afternoon. We're leaving, and everybody else is pretty much gone. She and I are standing in the parking lot, and that beautiful woman looked at me. She said, "Mike, you need to know I love you." I said, "Well, that's nice." And she says, "No. You need to know I really love you. And now you can give me a real hug, not one of those agape hugs, you know."

So a wonderful period of my life began. I'm doing things with a woman that I admire, I love, and who, for some reason, seems to admire and love me, and who is really beautiful. We're both doing things different too. She was a lot smarter than I was. Shortly after we started being romantic together, she showed up and she says, "Mike, I've written out my primary purpose for our relationship. I'd like to see yours soon."

She was very fond when she'd stand at these podiums and tell you. She would say that my primary purpose was so definite and detailed that it specified the color, clarity, and weight of the diamond that he was supposed to produce, and Mike's was so vague and general that it could have described his relationship with his cat. But getting those two things, getting having that group conscience, getting that together, was where a great deal of the sweetness of the relationship happened.

My home group has a retreat the second weekend in June every year. After that retreat was over, I was going out to Santa Fe to do a little AA and see some friends out there. I had a very early flight. The other thing that was different about this is I'm not going to be your shack-them-up honey. We are not living together until we're married, and we both agreed that was a good idea. So I had my place on the north side, and she lived on the west side in a little house near the airport.

Frequently when I'd travel, I'd bring my car over, put it in the garage, and she'd drive me to the airport because we'd save parking that way and all that stuff. We got to say hello and goodbye to each other. But this was like a 6:30 flight, and she'd have to get up early and lose some sleep. I tried to convince her not to do that. She says, "No, no. I don't mind getting up. I really want to take it. If you don't mind, if I drive you in my PJs." I said, "Hell no, honey."

So we did, and I went out. I went with our friend Tom up to Angel Fire. As I'm going up through these mountain passes, I lose my cell signal. So I turn my phone off so it doesn't eat the battery looking for a signal up there. She thought I turned the phone off because I was playing with my friends and didn't want to have anything to do with her. She was not a happy gal.

When I got back and turned my phone on, I had a couple voicemails. I called up, and we had a kind of an unsatisfactory conversation. Then we both, because we live life based on spiritual principles, quickly considered our own behavior and made amends with each other and set things right.

Now this becomes important because I flew home the next day. When I got back to the airport, Linda wasn't there to pick me up. I called in Dallas where I changed planes. I called when I landed in Indianapolis and everything else. I thought, well, first thought was, "God, I didn't think she was that mad. I thought we'd cleaned that up."

So eventually I understood she's not coming. I take a cab and go over to her house. I've got a key to the house. I go in, and I find she's collapsed on the bathroom floor. It's 9:30 at night now, but she'd collapsed on the bathroom floor that morning when she was getting ready for work. Her coffee was sitting there by the sink. She'd had a stroke. She was forty-seven years old, much younger than me. I always thought that it was going to be the other way around.

So I called the paramedics, and we got her to the hospital. We became in intensive care for five days, and finally we were told there was no hope. They weren't able to control the swelling in her brain. It crushed her brain stem, and we needed to go to hospice.

Because of these principles, I'm able to be a sane man for her, her sister, her nephews, her family. Her two brothers are still to this day drinking and living very chaotic lives. But I was able to be part of the solution instead of part of the problem. Part of that reason is because of what Don told me many years ago. Again, it was one of those things I just kind of filed away at the time and thought, "Well, that's nice, Don."

But Don told me, "Mike, as near as I can tell, there will always be at least two of you showing up in every situation. There's the guy who sincerely wants to be helpful and do the right thing and everything else. And then there's the part of you that it's all about you and what about me and where is mine and all this. You're not going to be able to do anything about that. Think of it like you got a wet drunk in the meeting. The more you try and shut him up, the louder he gets. And the more I try to pretend that there's not that other side of my personality and that other spirit that lives in me from time to time, the more problems I cause for others."

So I've got the crazy voice in my head. I'm standing there holding her head in my hand the last night of her life. Part of me is going, "This is a mess. This is not supposed to be happening. She's supposed to be helping me through to the other side. This is messing up my life and everything else."

Thank God I didn't have to be eaten alive with guilt and pretend that that wasn't going on because of what you taught me. I could be present with her. I could thank you for sharing, and I could be present with her as she stepped out of this life and into the next. And I can't tell you how glad I was.

When I got a break and went back to her house, she wasn't mad at me. There was a card sitting there on the table, and right next to it, she'd baked my favorite cake the night before and had it ready there to give to me to take home with me.

See, if I'd lived this way on my own, I would have missed all of that. I would have come home with a grudge. Who knows? In fact, I could have very easily. There was that voice saying, "Don't even bother to go over there tonight. Just go home. She'll call you when she's damn good and ready." Can you imagine how I'd feel if I'd left her a moment later laying in that bathroom? God is incredibly kind to me.

One of the disservices I think we do is we make meditation seem like it's inaccessible to a lot of people. At least that was my experience. I got here because I'm a child of the sixties and seventies, and by God, I knew what meditation was, you know. You folks in AA weren't didn't have a thing to teach me about meditation, you know. And wow, was I wrong. What a beautiful open field of experience for us to roam in.

But this didn't start to work for me until somebody took me back to the principles as they're laid out in our book for us. Don asked me what I thought meditation was, and I described some version of a magic carpet ride, you know, zoned out, tuned out, with a little spiritual altitude and attitude and all this kind of stuff. He says, "Well, cowboy, that might be true, but for our purposes here, let's go look at what that meant to Bill and Bob in their time." And he took me into a dictionary from the 1920s.

It turns out that as Bill and Bob were understanding meditation, we're talking essentially about effective thought. One of the first definitions they lay on us in Webster at that time is the example: "The general meditated that day's battle." In other words, he planned the battle. He thought about it. And what does our book say? We consider our plans for the day. It doesn't say we zone out. Doesn't say we get a blank mind. There's nothing about blank mind.

The reason I say that is because I watch so many people, and I was one of them, believe that we're failing at meditation because we don't have a blank mind. Now, from time to time, I do have a clear mind, but I am not failing at meditation. Especially in the beginning, I've got the monkey mind. It's all over. You know, it's notorious in my home group. They just tell the new guy, "Look, expect that the naked lady's going to come running through the room and don't even be surprised. God's not going to smite you, and you're going to be just fine. That's part of the deal."

God was very generous with me, although I didn't know it at the time. I got a free sample. When I was about sixty days sober and I was still not working any steps and all that, but I was going to a meeting. There was a man in this meeting who was very attracted to me. He had his own airplane and ran a company, and he spiritually decided that he must have it together. He had a great-looking wife. So he had what I wanted. Jim, every time he introduced himself, Jim would say, "My name is Jim, and I'm a devout eleventh stepper."

Well, now Jim thinks he's a devout eleventh stepper. Maybe I better check this out. So I went home. I knew better than to get a hold of the Big Book. That's too, you know. So I cracked the Twelve and Twelve open. I sat in my chair and I read the St. Francis prayer and relaxed, and I did have a peace come over me. Then it kind of went away. So I got up and went about my business.

Three days later, I'm sitting in a meeting. You could still smoke in them then. I realized I'm a guy that smoked so much he used to annoy other smokers. I'm sitting in this meeting and I look at the guy across the table from me. He lights a cigarette, and I realize I haven't had a cigarette in three days. I've never tried to quit. They're right there in my pocket. But for some reason, I got a sample.

Wow, there's something powerful that happened here. I immediately lit a cigarette out of just horror that I hadn't been smoking. I wasn't at all interested in not smoking, but what in the world happened that I wouldn't even think or want a cigarette for three days?

So I went ahead and got back in that chair that night. I got out the Twelve and Twelve and I read the St. Francis prayer again, and nothing happened. But God's too kind to me to let me believe that I can manipulate and manage this process. I did have the message. I did know from personal experience that there was real power available through this step if I'd pursue it.

Of course, being who I was, I got distracted at that time. I was busy with another spiritual endeavor. Actually, that was the one that got me fired by my second sponsor. I was dating a married woman in the program, sponsoring her sixteen-year-old son, and I was playing cards on the weekend with her husband. He was a gun-toting federal agent. My sponsor at the time grabbed me in the parking lot of the club one day and he said, "Mike, I love you, but every time I try and confront you about your behavior, you start to explain it to me in such a way that it starts to sound like it might be God's will. I know that's insane. So I can't have anything to do with you."

The meditation had gone on the back burner for a period of time there, but it's only deferred. It was through this whole process of seeking that's laid out in the book. My successful meditation this morning was really set up by the way I wound up my day last night. I sat down, and without guilt or remorse, I just kind of took stock. What did the day look like? If somebody was following Mike around, what would it have looked like? What went, you know—this tells me not to worry about guilt, remorse, and all that kind of stuff. It's just kind of, okay, give me the facts. What did it look like?

Where were you rude? Where were you? Did you take time? You know, the guy who wanted to talk to you about his child, did you cut him off because you were in a hurry to go get your coffee? What things would you like to have looked different tomorrow?

See, because if I don't have a caring concern to examine what my behavior was today, how is God supposed to take it seriously when I get on my knees tomorrow morning and ask him to make me wonderful? You said, "What's that?" That's not God punishing me. That's me just getting the consequences of my behavior. So just take a quick look at that.

One of the things my friend Clint suggested to me is that because I was having trouble getting that done before bedtime, he said, "Well, look, Mike. I'm busy, too. I've got this law practice out in LA and everything else. Frequently my and I'm active in Alcoholics Anonymous, and frequently, you know, before my head hits the pillow isn't a good time. So what I do is I review my day at the end of my business day before I leave the office, before I close the desk down and everything else. I just kind of take stock of the day from that point, you know."

That seems to work for those times if I'm failing to do it, because at the end of the day, at the end of the day, I'm way too tired to do it. So I did that.

Clint gave me another exercise that was very helpful to me. He said, "Mike, I'd like you to start your morning after your meditation. I'd like you to take a Post-it note and make a list of the four or five things that you're not going to be willing to do today to have a better relationship with God." And I said, "Well, Clint, what about all the things I'm willing to do?" He says, "Well, now those won't be causing you any trouble, will they?"

Post-it note, that's all it takes—a spiritual tool. At the time I wrote this particular one, I absolutely was unwilling to give up the idea that I can read your mind. I can stand up here right now and look out, and I can look into your faces, and I can tell what every one of you is thinking. And you know, that's rarely a good thing for me. Somebody's back there with a terrible expression on their face, and you know, maybe it was something you ate this morning. It was the eggs, you know. But I'm sure that's the dagger of self-centeredness. I'm sure it's all about me, and I never get the answer that I want there.

So I'm unwilling to give up mind-reading. I'm unwilling to give up my belief that I can predict the future. "Well, I can try sponsoring this guy, but I know how it's going to turn out." You know, I got to tell you, I had the pleasure of attending a wedding in June for a guy that almost everybody had given up on. If I hadn't loved him so much, I might have, too. But I spent Christmas Eve in the emergency room with him and his ex-wife and all this stuff.

Bob ended his run living behind a 7-Eleven in Las Vegas. It was in July. He had lost his shoes and was wrapping t-shirts around his feet so he could stand to walk on the pavement to go and try and hustle a drink. I went to his wedding in June, and his ex-wife had blessed the wedding. His son was his best man, and his daughter was there, and his new stepdaughter was there. They danced and they played and they had a wonderful time.

See, I get reminded what we're really about. One of the lessons Don had always told me is, "Mike, this isn't so much about sobriety. Yes, sobriety is the beginning. It's the foundation. But the real work here is to put damaged families back together again and hopefully heal them where possible and to create new ones where those damages won't happen again or if it does, we can heal again."

So the miracle is, I love it when I see things like that in Alcoholics Anonymous. When I gave Bob his five-year coin, I said, "You know, I absolutely knew what I was going to say at your memorial service. I don't have any idea what to say today." And we're clear that God did that.

I'm unwilling to be just average. I either want to be the best you've ever seen or the worst you've ever seen. But the toughest thing for me is just to ask me to be a team player, to be one of the guys. I was living a life full of distraction, and distraction—the destructive one—was dating the married woman with the gun-toting husband. That's level one. I'm spiritually elevated, so I tone this down. Now I'm at this time spending more money than I have.

The speedway in the beltway is fifty-five miles an hour. I think God gave me the right to drive eighty when I'm in a hurry and there isn't heavy traffic there. So I can always have my eyes glued to the rearview mirror to see if there's a cop on the off-ramp and so forth. The result is I may not get a ticket, but I arrive at my destination and I don't even know where I've been, because all my attention's been on the rearview mirror and here and there and everything else.

I've got a life that's built—whether it's the TV I'm watching or I mean, I actually DVR programs that make me mad. How insane is that? There's some people on cable that just drive me nuts. I record that so I can go, "What's up with that, you know?" This is what a spiritual mike looks like.

So my life is full of distraction. I bring it in there. Clint said, "You know, don't try and change these things. Just take this and put it in your pocket. As you go out that morning, and when you run into a problem during the day and things aren't going right, reach in and take a look at that list. You'll see that you made a decision this morning that brought this problem into your life. You can go scrape the 'happens' bumper sticker off the car. It doesn't happen. You make decisions and consequences happen."

For me, that's part of a process of change because anything that gets me directly