I did Step 10 for the first time when I did Steps 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, and 9. That's how difficult Step 10 is for people in recovery. It's so hard that it has to be broken down for us into six separate Steps. Half the Program, therefore, is devoted to doing Step 10 for the first time.

This upside-down way of looking at Step 10 reminds us of how painfully difficult it is for those of us in recovery to take ongoing inventory and promptly admit when we are wrong. Even when expanded to six distinct Steps, it requires a degree of effort that means we remember ever after our first Step 4 or our first Step 9.

But as we finish Step 9, something has changed in us. We have entered the world of the Spirit, as the AA Big Book reminds us. And as a result, we are urged to perform on an ongoing, daily basis those previous six Steps which were so hard for us to do for the first time.

To see Step 10 simply as a "maintenance" step does it less than justice. If we are to persist in our recovery and move along the spiritual path we've chosen, it should become routine for us to do each and every day what took weeks, months, even years the first time we did it. For that practice to become "routine" is more than mere maintenance. It is the development and practice of a new way of living.