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I was at a meeting recently where the conversation drifted toward deep analysis of the word “promptly” in the 10th Step. As a reminder, the 10th Step says, “Continued to take personal inventory, and when we were wrong promptly admitted it.”

To me, that means that you take a look at your day, figure out if you owe any amends, then you take care of cleaning up your role in whatever mess you participated in. Pretty basic stuff.

At that meeting, my mind drifted toward the “promptly” part because a guy shared a comparison that had been given to him by a sober friend. His friend had told him that the “promptly” part is a little bit like eating a bowl of oatmeal and leaving it in the sink. If you fill it up with water and rinse it out, you probably have no issue. But if you let that oatmeal dry for eight hours and then try to wash it, you’re dealing with a different thing.

I nodded my head because the comparison is obvious—if I am out of line about something and I wait five years to correct it, that is not good. Whatever the original issue was, now it is dry oatmeal stuck to the side of a bowl. So that’s where the promptly comes in.

But I also have been told over the years that “promptly” doesn’t have to mean “instantly.” There is a big difference. If you say something mean to your spouse at 10 am, is it better to blurt out an apology at 10:05? Or am I better off working through it and making sure I do it right at 11 am or 1 pm?

I think there are situations where the right answer could be either option—I’ve definitely fired off a shitty comment and then immediately realized it was unacceptable and I’ve said that right away, and that was the right thing to do. But I have also seen the benefit of calling up a sober friend, going to a meeting and praying for a few minutes, then doing an apology the right way.

I find that sometimes my immediate apologies are over-the-top in two different ways. One is that I go overboard and act like I just stole their puppy and I backtrack off what my point might have been. By that, I mean, if I think it is a terrible idea for one of my kids to spend $300 on a sweatshirt at Lululemon and I say a snippy thing that I regret, I will immediately want to say, “I am sorry, I shouldn’t have said that. Here is $300 and please let me drive you to Lululemon.” Then I get pissy about it later because I realize I wasn’t trying to clean up a mess that I made with any sort of integrity—I just didn’t want her to be mad at me. That is some people-pleasing b******t by doing an instant apology.

The other way I mess up instant apologies is by saying, “I’m sorry I said that, but you were being a jerk.” That’s not an apology! That’s justification. Maybe I need to stand my ground on something principled but still apologize for a bad behavior, but I rarely am able to spiritually respond five seconds into a disagreement with that level of serenity. It takes some time to get that right.

So the oatmeal analogy is so good—it doesn’t even require you to completely wash out the bowl! You rinse it and loosen up the gunk still in the bowl, then you wash it a little later. It’s actually perfect, isn’t it?

I will be thinking about that bowl of oatmeal a lot going forward, and I bet that is a phrase I end up saying to people in my sober life in the next few years. I will leave out one key part of that phrase, though—I have never eaten a bowl of oatmeal in my life, and don’t plan to! So I don’t like oatmeal… but I love that phrase!

This newsletter is a place of joy and laughter about the deadly serious business of sobriety. So, as I will often do, let me close with a joke:

HEARD AT MEETINGS: “My drinking could be divided into three stages: impulsive, compulsive, and repulsive.”

(Credit: AA Grapevine, February 2002, Gary from St. Catherine’s, Ontario)

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