This is my first day of blogging. So why another blog? After all, they're scattered all over the Internet.

I guess it's about several things. For long periods of my life I've been writing. In the early 60s I was a staff writer for a major newspaper for more than a year. While I was incarcerated during the 1960s and 70s I worked on prison publications. In the 1980s I started a small publication in Arizona, which I later sold. Part of what got me to the point of publishing my own blog started when I was listening to a talk show about a year ago. The host, a doctor, made the statement that he had written and published 32 books over the past 30 years. I was amazed! How does someone have a career as a doctor, talk show host, and also have time to write over 30 books? The obvious answer, when I started thinking about it, was that he wrote a little bit each day.

So last September 16 I started writing each day. At first I started writing my life story. In fact I completed some 42,000 words and decided that I would set it aside because I didn't find my life that exciting. Then I took off on a fiction story. I completed about 34,000 words of that before I realized that I didn't know much about plotting. I've learned that writing fiction is more difficult than turning out news stories and articles. At about the same time I started reading a daily recovery meditation that was sent to my e-mail. It really resonated with me because I work in the recovery field and have nearly 20 years of sobriety. And this e-mail meditation was all about recovery. The more I read these meditations the more I realized that I could probably write a daily meditation. So I just took off doing it as a daily writing exercise. Soon I realized that I could probably put something like this in a blog and link it to our nonprofit's website. And, here we are.

Because I'm the CEO of a large recovery program in Arizona I mostly view life through the eyes of recovery. On a daily basis my staff and I deal with the emotional ups and downs of 600 recovering substance abusers who live with, and in some instances work for, us. For 12 years I've volunteered each Monday night to run an aftercare group for some of those in our program. As a result of all this experience I decided that my blog would be about things in everyday life that I can relate to recovery.

There is no shortage of topics. I see many things in daily life that relate to recovery, that might be the topic of a blog. Empathy, generosity, kindness, honesty, joy and a myriad of other human characteristics weave through our daily lives. We just have to look for them. While there are many examples that I can use, my more difficult chore will be viewing them through my sometimes smudged lenses of recovery. Whatever the result, I just want to contribute something to those who are trying to stay sober.