20 feet from my front door for over three years and regretfully, I just now met my neighbor.

We’d casually greeted one another namelessly with our pups in passing to and from wherever our very private lives had taken us all these many seasons, but I never really knew him until today when by what seemed like chance, we shared a pizza, two equally sordid pasts, and one very long embrace.

Our busy comings and goings had navigated us to and from others we’d deemed either critical or unnecessary to our routines until today when, quite serendipitously, we stumbled upon each other unencumbered, petless, and without excuse for a just another bland hello.

In an exchange that went from zero to sixty inside the first five minutes, two single men who live alone, neither with much of a social life, found a friend. Our dogs, both the same breed and size and also of different colors, found the same.

Amazing–a word I seldom use–would be an the best description of the similarities we found in most experiences and outlooks of our mutual lives.

Add in our recovered pasts and redeemed presents, odds for a future developing friendship were becoming better than even.

Funny, we spend our lives in search of people we like and are like, and they end up sleeping twenty feet and one welcome mat away all along.

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46Susan Pierce, Debbie Moyer Wallace and 44 others

On a clear day you can see forever.

Everyone needs a sabbath.

A day with nothing on the calendar. No honey-do’s. No obligations. Nothing. A clear day to rest, reflect and ponder all things bigger than yourself and your circumstances.

It’s good for you.

And especially on Sunday where in worship on a clear day, you can truly see Forever.

I didn’t have it in me to take even one more call.

On my eleventh hour fueled only by a 20 minute noon sandwich, the flashing red light on my phone kept blinking like an ambulance. It was already after five when I called it a stoplight from God at the intersection of a very long day and busier tomorrow.

I’d earned this drive home, dinner with my dog and what’s lately been seeming more like a short winter’s nap than a good night’s sleep.

After a hot shower and shave this cold and blustery morning, I sported my longest topcoat, the length of which rivals my day ahead in this business of keeping poor people housed and fed with the lights on. That red flashing light would surely still be waiting there for me this morning along with a dozen other calls from the unfortunate many.

In early at the office, I turned on the coffee and tended to my opening routine, passing my doorway where the room illuminated red from the tiny light on my phone that had begged an answer all night long.

Coffee in hand, I listened.

A 74 year old man had just watched his home, bed and a backseat of possessions be towed away from a nearby parking lot and he needed a place to sleep for the night, transportation, and a little hope.

There are times I question the things I have come to believe I deserve. This is a business of flashing red lights that can eat you alive and spit your heart out one day with no shred of mercy in the morning.

It’s too early but I’m already on the phone trying to reach a cold old man out there somewhere and a little personal redemption in what will be another thankless day, but strangely worth every moment.

For 15 years as a psychotherapist, I was paid handsomely for providing observations about my patients’ behavior, thinking, reasoning, communication and relational styles. Subsequently, I helped them to successfully navigate each toward a more adaptable, functional way of living. Because they were patients, I gently operated under assumption that their willingness to follow my lead was implicit. After all, they sought me, not vice versa. When they were less willing, therapy included a brief detour into deliberate discussions which helped them to ask me for what I was hired to provide. Success usually followed and at the end of treatment, they were empowered, believing they, for the most part, were their own guide out of the dark and into the light. That exact outcome made my work a joy.

Since those days, encountering acquaintances, friends and people I loved, I knew I could not be their therapists and, indeed, was not. I merely sifted my clinical impressions of each through an undetectable, internal mental health sieve and kept and continued only with those who had best friendship potential. Neither they nor my process was ever perfect, but with the exception of friends acquired during my drug days (which are 11 years in the past on Sunday) the method has saved me much heartache and failed efforts trying to fix anyone who hasn’t asked for it. It was fair to me and it was fair to them. It seemed to work.

My present struggle is with the few exceptions–the ones who slipped through and continue in my life–to whom I cannot and will not offer unsolicited yet well-meaning suggestions and opinions but who yet have maintained some presence nonetheless. My social circle today is the smallest it has ever been for this extrovert and the prospect of discontinuing even one relationship I’ve allowed in would represent a significant percentage loss from the whole of them. But as I get older, being accepted is less important so I keep a safe distance. The quantity of people in my life is far less important than the quality of the people I allow to remain.

Still, it’s the hardest thing, to say indirect goodbyes through my absence and lack of perseverance in a relationship I might have once counted as a keeper. However, it’s often the change most necessary for our survival that is the most difficult to effect. Still, abandonment of the least healthy of these makes one just that much closer to loneliness.

I’ve been to therapy myself and in doing so, discovered not only how my addiction was killing me but also how it had utterly destroyed relationships I once treasured. Sobriety. Don’t leave home without it.

Satan delivers terrible gifts.

After years without more than a thought about using, on the eve of my 11th year of sobriety, I just woke from a slew of degrading drug dreams from when I did unimaginable things on Meth like it was dejá vu on steroids. Still so tired, I’m thankfully awake and even moreso thankful to God for the rescue. Kids, don’t do drugs. If they don’t kill you, later on the memories will still try.

Up again, doom scrolling. Scanning headlines and social platforms of this digital age and I wonder if exposure to so much more bad news and events clamoring for our attention is the price we pay for being well-informed?

Reports of tragedy, hardship, pain and suffering at lightspeed makes real the fact that life on this big blue ball is both deadly and tragic and closer than we think.

Without the internet, we were largely protected from that reality growing up, allowing more time and headspace in our young minds to play, dream, hope and be happy at a pace and in ways today’s children will never know.

When I’m gone, don’t remember me, remember what I’ve left behind.

The most important instances captured in history books are rarely about the person by name but the changes they made to effect upon others while they were here and when they are long gone.

Remembering a dead man is uninspiring but remembrance of his life work is.

A meaningful life is never about attribution but contribution.

[Last time I posted this, a friend commented “Well written, I am going on 2 years of celibacy. The thoughts expressed in this post are similar to mine. First time I’ve seen anyone write something along the same line. Thanks for sharing.” I believe others who have chosen a celibate existence need to know they aren’t alone.]

I’ve been celibate since 2011, and the further I get from sex, the better I understand love.

It was a choice I made when I got off drugs and a choice I make still today, “celibating” my 11th year.

Not much is written about celibacy. In this sexually-slathered world, it’s not a very popular subject. It alienates, labels and renders one less than desirable by many who still regard sex as a plaything —an inalienable right to exercise freely, frequently, and with anyone they choose without much regard for its significance or consequence beyond being a driven, primal, self-indulgent pleasure.

To be honest, I’ve had more sexual partners in my lifetime than I care to remember. Many I choose not to remember, most I can’t, and in hindsight, all I regret except for the union of love that produced my three wonderful children. And that was many, many years ago.

There’s a huge difference between mere resistance to sexual temptation and a conscious choice of celibacy. The first one spends hours fending off attacks of urges while the other refuses to wage the war. One is a choice to be in constant turmoil while the other is a constant choice of dignity and self preservation. No engagement. No frustration. Little preoccupation with momentary pleasures.

Most men find it an incomprehensible option to be celibate. Culture has made great strides over recent decades not only to make open, multi-partnered sexuality the “normal” way of life and to banish or render odd those who believe and choose differently.

Imagine, if you can, the amount of sitcom time spent on the subject of sex. Imagine the number of stories and exposés about the sexual foibles of otherwise good men and women. Imagine the volume of time, the countless pages, the vastness of entire industries spent on sexual pursuits and libido-lifting messages, telling us it’s just as healthy a way to stay in shape as aerobic exercise. No, it’s not your imagination. Since the 60s, it’s reality. Truth is, sex has become the replacement of an important need by an urgent one.

I don’t watch much TV, largely because of its stupidifying effect on the masses. I do watch movies though. Lots of movies. And even there, I see how unentertaining most plot lines might be without the sex factor. The general malaise about and lack of creativity within media is largely due to the potency of the sex factor able to arouse and stimulate single-minded misled people climaxing in applause for an on screen violation of what might have otherwise been a potentially creative story. But with sex shoved down the throats of the masses (pun partially intended) as if we were all malnourished hookers, we’ve learned to hunger for it like the rush of a smoking bowl of meth.

As a social consolation, those who promote free sexuality have successfully fended off attacks by seasoning their stimulating appeals with “love, romance and intimacy” as if to give added value to what they are really selling. Eroticism is now much wider in its appeal, equating being sexual with someone—or anyone for that matter—quite the “special” thing. Special with this one, special with that one, and each special encounter so meaningful in its own way.

But sex is not the highest form of love. Not by a long shot.

Humanity’s lie has been to suggest that sexual union with another is the most intimate expression of love in the world. As a celibate man, I believe nothing could be further from the truth.

To obey the greatest commandment to love one another is a far cry from indulging in a passionate roll in the hay with them. Loving acts have staying power while sex quickly goes…well…flaccid.

Celibacy creates a vacuum for eminently more important things.

The years I have spent without losing small pieces of my soul to random sexual partners has opened my eyes to greater forms of love I might have otherwise never known existed. When I stopped seeking pleasure, a vacuum was created inside of me and I began seeking to fill it with true love. Not a person. Not another. Love.

Big difference.

Storge, philia, agape. Go ahead. Look them up. Affection, friendship, unconditional love. These alternate kinds of love always get the shaft from sex promoters, yet they are the kinds of love expressions that make you cry at commercials, weep at songs and experience the joy of the spirit of a sports team with an incredibly moving back story. They are the kinds of loves you remember over and over again, long after that casual fling left your bed for home.

Perhaps one day I’ll rediscover that eros kind of love again and my celibate days will be over. But I’ve found that my freed mind is now capable of deep thought that births deeper experiences of love and compassion and a preoccupation with things that last much longer than an orgasmic minute. And when I do find it, I’ll have learned to respect it with much more dignity than I ever did before.

And if I never do, I will nonetheless have learned to love as a celibate man, and by then I should be a pretty good at it, because the further I get from sex, the better I understand love.