Smoking…

Everyone knows what is bad about smoking, but no one is talking about what is good about smoking.  I’ve got a few things to say about that.  Now that I’ve quit, I have to notice what I liked about it and what purpose it served for me. For one, my parents smoked, so I don’t have that negative response to the smell of cigarettes.  When I smell smoke in my house, it reminds me of my mother, which is a nourishing, nurturing feeling.  So – with the smell of cigarette smoke comes this “at home” feeling.   The other piece is that lighting up a cigarette always put a period to whatever I was doing, in other words the cigarette was my signal to the universe that the activity (whatever it was) was done, over, finished. So, it’s not just the after meal time cigarette, but the after work, the after the chore, the after the you-know-what and on and on.  A cigarette was the exclamation point of finito!  I am done!  The cigarette was the space between now and then…  Associated with the cigarette is the feeling of accomplishment, it is the finish point and is therefore part of the finish line.

There was one more point of the cigarette – and I really didn’t discover this until the last decade: it provides space between myself and others.  I could use the cigarette to get another person to move away from me, to get them to give me room and / or, just to, flat out, get away from them.  A cigarette can be a tool of rejection.

The problem with all of that is that I can’t control the cigarette, it would control me.  So even when I was not done with a project, I would have to stop in the middle of it and go have a cigarette just to get rid of the nicotine craving.  This is a very unpleasant feeling and can be an unwelcome interruption to any activity (particularly the you-know-what activity).  Even when I don’t want to reject someone, the cigarette would reject them – because after all – what non-smoker wants to be in the middle of all of that mess?

So here I am, a self professed non-smoker, struggling with all of the craving and lingering detoxification of nicotine. Each day when I wake up, my first thought is: “Will I fight it today?  Will it work without a fight?”  Either way, the outcome is same – same.  I will not smoke a cigarette.