Tapping on an unsuspected inner resource

I received great news last night that a good friend passed the exam for his Merchant Mariner Master's license.  This is something that he has wanted for some time.  Ten years of alcoholic drinking from his late teens into his late 20's robbed him of a high school degree,  positive study habits, and a host of other things that the non-alcoholic learns at that age.  His inability to do math has been a huge drawback.  His ADHD mind just doesn't process how to do even the simplest of equations.

I've been in touch with him while he was away at a maritime training institute.  Several phone calls were to tell me that he had passed several tests.  And then there was the phone call to tell me that he did not think that he could possibly pass the chart navigation part of the exam.  It included math formulas.  Nothing he had studied was making any sense and the courses that he took previously on navigation were like a blank in his mind.

I told him to do his best and think positively.  I went over some of the equations with him, reminding him that he mastered them before.  I don't know how the ADHD mind works, but I have some idea of alcoholic thinking which is mostly pessimistic and even negative.  He has said that this was his "last chance" to make something of himself.  Getting this license was, in his mind, an opportunity to prove that he amounted to something.  Even though he has been sober for 21 years, he feels so much unworthiness.

So he has been in lectures all day and into the evening for the past two weeks, has stayed up late and gotten up very early to study.  He has studied with the intensity of someone during college exam week.  And I wondered whether he would be able to pull it off.  Yesterday, it all came together with something clicking in his mind enough to get a 90 on the most difficult exam and scores in the high 90's on the other exams.  I am more than glad for him.  For him this was a milestone of success.

I don't know how it all came together in his mind on the one day when it really counted.  I can't explain these things, but somehow, I think that a power greater than him had a hand in this too.  And from this accomplishment, his parents, his family, his friends are all heaving a sigh of relief and smiling with joy.

"With few exceptions our members find that they have tapped on an unsuspected inner resource which they presently identify with their own conception of a power greater than themselves." ~Alcoholics Anonymous