The Cola Rule: You Don’t Know What You Don’t Know

Like most alcoholics, I knew everything during the early days of recovery. I knew more than my counselor. I knew more than my wife (and boy, was I quick to remind her). I knew more than you.

I knew all the people, places, and things that justified my drinking. “You’d drink too if you had a ________. (job, wife, family, parents, etc., etc.)

I also knew I was different than the people around the tables. They weren’t talking about what I needed to do to get everyone off my back and let me get on with my life. This whole 12 Step thing wasn’t for me; I knew it wasn’t what I needed.

But as my white-knuckled days and required meetings came to pass, my hearing began to improve. Messages I’ve probably ignored all my life started to find their way through the cracks in my ego. Still fighting but pausing long enough to listen, I became open to the idea that maybe I didn’t know everything about me or about alcoholism.

Then one day, I overhead at a meeting, someone say, “I don’t understand how it works; it just does.” I suddenly remembered an afternoon back when I was a teenager working on electric golf carts during my summer job. The assistant pro and I were about to clean the battery terminals when he asked me to get an RC Cola out of the pop machine. His request took me by surprise because we had been reprimanded by the head pro a few days before for swiping bottles of pop out of the machine (we had a key).

I handed him the RC Cola, and he promptly poured a few ounces on the battery terminals. Low and behold, I watched the pop fizzle when it hit the battery posts and dissolve the corrosion around the terminals. Just like that, the posts were clean. I was mystified.

Now, if you would have asked me back then, on that bright and sunny day when the world was rich with possibilities for a 17-year-old, to look around and find something — anything — that would clean battery terminals, the last thing I would have guessed would have been RC Cola. No way.

Today, if I’m restless and discontent, if my thoughts wander off to challenge the wonder of my sobriety, if I question how the miracles came into my life and am anxious about what lies ahead, I try to recall the RC Cola Rule.

You don’t know what you don’t know.