Rule # 62

RULE # 62

…Then he did something else that was to become an A.A. classic. It all went on a little card about golf-score size. The cover read: “Middleton Group #1. Rule #62.” Once the card was unfolded, a single pungent sentence leaped to the eye: “Don’t take yourself too damned seriously.”

The Twelve Steps and

Twelve Traditions, p. 149

&

I have a choice; either view my life as a great tragedy or I can see it as a hilarious comedy. Is life a short taper burning from birth to death or more of a series of crazy comedy skits of a late night variety show?

    So much of my life had been taken too lightly. I had admonished myself to take things like my job, my relationships and the consequences of my foolish behavior, more seriously. Playing the fool, I’d fooled myself into thinking I was either more important… more gifted than others, or, that I was a failure at everything I tried to accomplish. After all, the widows of opportunity had opened and slammed shut so many times for me, I was getting past that age I could have passed through to success. I resigned to being little more than a has been… once a contender… to quickly becoming one of those lost souls I hauled around town in my taxi late at night, staving off the loneliness of despair.

    Meditation, we think it so serious… there I sit on a cushion breathing in and out… I approach the center of my soul and see the face of God laughing: a cosmic laugh so infectious that I laugh with it. There it is… the Fool card of the Tarot... the first card of the Major Arcana says it clearly (The Joker being the only trump card from the Tarot remaining in the player deck of cards). The journey begins with everything I own in a little pack on the end of a stick walking towards a precipice, or, it is the Joker, reminding the King he is but a human being wearing the mask and robes of a King. If that isn’t funny, what is? Where does the fool go when I smile a Buddha smile?

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