Before sobriety
Step One contains two propositions:
1. We admitted we were powerless over alcohol—that our lives had become unmanageable.
Note that these are connected with an em dash (the long dash, longer than an en dash and longer than a hyphen), indicating entailment (if proposition A is true, proposition B is automatically true).
This is simple and clear. The management of life requires the liver to take certain actions at certain times (show up at work, pay bills, fulfil domestic duties) and refrain from others (being rude to people, staying up all night, getting arrested). If Susan, against her best interests and will, gets drunk and stays drunk, she cannot do the things she should or refrain from the things she shouldn't. Her powerlessness over alcohol entails the unmanageability of her life.
Note that the term is unmanageable not unmanaged. The suffix -able denotes fundamental ability not state at a particular point in time. The fact that a life is unmanageable might be inferred from the fact that it is disordered (as a result of not being managed). But this inference would be unreliable. Someone might be able to manage their life but has chosen not to because they do not presently care. The inference also fails in the other direction: someone's powerlessness over alcohol might have resulted in occasions where the individual has failed do what they should and has done what they shouldn't, but these failures and actions have not yet caused visible, grave, and persistent harm to the fabric of their life. After all, regular people are grossly imperfect at managing their lives, so the point of comparison is flawed. Unmanageability will lead to disorder, eventually, but the state of unmanageability settles down well before disorder manifests.
The serious difficulties present in a life that has not been managed because the life is unmanageable by the individual, in turn because that individual is powerless, are not intrinsically unsolvable: a competent person can usually discern a king's road through the difficulties to a land of order and plenty. The unmanageability does not refer to intrinsic insolubility of those difficulties but to the impossibility of those difficulties being solved given the periodically drunken state of the individual.
In sobriety
Life, when one is sober, is intrinsically manageable. Relieved of the necessity of drinking, and drinking to excess, with all of its baleful consequences, I am free to take the actions I should and refrain from those I shouldn't. Obviously, wisdom and discipline will also be required, and these can be gradually acquired.
One's life, in other words, will need to be managed, if it is to be ordered. Decisions will need to be made about the general structure and content of one's life. One needs to pay attention and juggle all sorts of different obligations, opportunities, and options. In a sense, these are management.
The dangers in this endeavour are manifold, but chief among them are these:
- Neurotic preoccupation with insecurities and how to allay them
- False values (those based on self)
- Speculation about abstract notions such as value, identity, and purpose
- Over-fixing of problems that aren't (yet) problems
- Obsession with external factors affecting one's life (people, the world, its ways)
- Wrongful scheming and acting to influence or control such factors
As you can see, there is an awful lot to avoid, mentally. Let's look instead at what one's focus should be:
- Get on with the everyday tasks
- At times deliberately set aside (Step Eleven): consider prayerfully larger questions of structure and content
- Such higher matters should not be considered at other times