“10. Continued to take personal inventory and when we were wrong promptly admitted it.” (Chapter 5, Big Book)
If I was good at this, I would never need to rework Steps One to Nine. However, I’m not. Step Ten catches situations in which I experience eye-catching emotion or encounter eye-watering difficulties. Most character defects or deviations from God’s will either do not produce eye-catching emotion or eye-watering difficulties, so will go unnoticed, progressing, amplifying, spreading, infecting until significant damage has been done, or even have the effect of gradually putting me to sleep spiritually, inching me into a mindless materialism with a mental landscape populated with society’s contemporary clichés, my brain producing images, my mouth producing words, but my mind knocked out altogether, locked in a treadmill of routines, habits, and overwhelming incoming sensory input, as my unconscious thinks, speaks, and acts through me without any awareness on my part. This is actually the plot of horror films: zombie contagion.
Consequently, I rework all the steps, which is ‘practising these principles in all my affairs’.
This means:
- Constantly reworking the first three steps as I work with sponsees.
- Performing ad-hoc one-through-nine sequences on knotty problems
- Performing a 360-degree review of beliefs, thinking, and conduct in a quarterly review
This catches and fixes what Step Ten misses and wakes me up out of the putrefactive, necrotic slumber referred to above.