“Here are the steps we took, which are suggested as a program of recovery” (Page 59, Big Book)
In Mission Impossible, you’re offered a mission to take up, if you’re willing. You don’t have to take it up. But if you do, you take it up as it is: you do not have the authority or power to alter the mission.
I am at liberty to not take up the programme, and do so something else instead that resembles the programme but is a deviation from it or a development of it. No one will stop me. What joyous freedom!
That freedom does not extend, however, to securing the results of the programme by adopting other means. I can choose a different path, but that will necessarily give rise to a different outcome. I am free to go through a different door, but I’m not free to have that different door lead to the same room. So much for freedom!