Today I celebrate 33 years of continuous sobriety. Last year I completely forgot about my 32nd year anniversary until someone reminded me. I had been overseas working for a month and spent August 4, of 2016 navigating a 15-hour travel schedule back to home in New Orleans. This year I have been thinking about my 33 years of sobriety a reasonable amount. Some of the reasons include:

Over the past year I have been very actively engaged in regular Step Work, spending several weeks on each step, writing, thinking, discussing, living, and reincorporating the 12 Steps into my day-to-day existence. Although every day in sobriety I have remembered that I am an alcoholic in recovery, over the years I have also done more intensive refresher courses, as it were, to continue to grow and travel along my recovery road.

This heightened sense of recovery in my daily existence has also led to an increased sense of gratitude. I am 65 years old. Without question, and with no intent for dramatic impact, were it not for my decision to follow a 12 Step program of recovery, I would have been dead long ago or locked up in prison for some alcohol related offense and living a life of forced sobriety. I know that I am not tough enough to be that stereotypical skid row drunk, and that was my trajectory before sobriety.

I am also fully aware that everything – from the dog laying at my feet, to the back porch of my family’s home in New Orleans where I sit, to my formal retirement last year from a successful career, to my continuing professional activity today – none of that would be possible were it not for recovery.

After I was sober for a couple of years, my mother asked me why I still needed to go to meetings and maybe I could just have a beer occasionally. Therein lies one of the greatest gifts of recovery – the 12 Step Program from which I will never graduate. Re-doing my Fourth Step a few months ago brought insights about my character of which I could not conceive when doing my first Fourth Step in 1984. Those insights allow me the opportunity to travel a recovery path today more aligned with a true self. That process never ends. As I proclaim in the title of this blog, recovery is truly a process and not an event.

I have the opportunity to travel paths that my “contempt prior to investigation” in active addiction would never have allowed. My previous post is one such example.

And today, I truly have a choice. I am no longer like the ball in a pinball machine after taking that first drink. Today, I can choose to prioritize how I spend my existence, living intentionally and with meaning.

I long ago resigned from the discussions about whether AA is cult, alcoholism is a disease, etc. etc. Those issues have no relevance to me. As I am fond of saying “If every breath I have ever taken has gotten me to exactly where I am today, I would not change a thing.” Today August 4, 2017, as I sit on my back porch in New Orleans and type these words into my laptop, 33 years after I checked myself into a detox center in Cincinnati, Ohio, I still would not change a thing.

Thank You.