Francis Berger
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Communication and All The Smoke in My Life

6/14/2019

3 Comments

 
I have decided to stop smoking. I will not go into my history of smoking, my previous failed attempts at quitting, or any of the details that ultimately inspired my decision. That sort of thing tends to bore readers and outsiders. Instead, I would like to take a page from William Arkle and approach my decision to quit from the perspective of communication. 

Whether we acknowledge it or not, the cosmos is constantly communicating information to us. By this I do not mean the obvious lines of communication such as the mass media, conversations with people, or personal sensations such as pleasure and pain. Everyone is more or less aware of these kinds of messages, though even these are often misinterpreted, misconstrued, or misunderstood. What I am referring to are far higher and more subtle lines of communication, ones that often go unnoticed or are disregarded. 

Over the past month or so, I have experienced many of what I would term coincidences and synchronicities regarding my tobacco habit. To begin with, smoking has been at the forefront of my consciousness for the better part of four weeks. This itself is strange because I had rarely given smoking much thought at all over the past decade or two.

Yet, for reasons I cannot explain, I have been thinking about quitting smoking a great deal lately. The source of these thoughts are not external, as they often were in the past. In other words, anti-smoking television campaigns or the startling images plastered on cigarette packets have not been the source of my impulse to quit. The impulse originated from somewhere deep within my own thinking. 

However, the moment I began thinking about smoking, I began picking up on strange signals in the external world - symbols and snippets of communication that mirrored exactly what I had been quietly thinking about. Once again, these were not obvious forms of communication like anti-smoking ads. They were far more nuanced in their symbolism.

I disregarded the first four or five of these as meaningless coincidences, but the signals kept coming. They grew stronger and harder to ignore as time went on, so much so that the past week has been akin to standing next to a wailing air raid siren.

In light of all of this, I have come to the following realization - if I ignore what I have experienced over the past month, it will be at my own peril. Not physical peril or psychological peril, but spiritual peril.

I am approaching the matter from an entirely different angle now. It is not about conquering a physical addiction or overcoming psychological dependence.

It is about communication and thinking, which means it is spiritual. Which means it simply must be done. And done it will be.

In all honesty, I feel very positive now that the smoke is clearing.
3 Comments
John Fitzgerald link
6/15/2019 09:21:52

I smoked for 28 years, from the age of 14 to 41 (or 1984 to 2012). I was a very proud smoker and never once thought of giving up. I cut down towards the end, but only so I could make the enjoyment of a cigarette more pronounced by making it rarer.

Then I went to Australia with my wife (we weren't married at the time) to see her family. As none of them smoked, I decided to go without cigs until New Year's Eve, 15 days after we arrived in the country.
I had been really looking forward to that smoke but I could only manage a couple of 'blasts'. It felt awful. I was like a teenager again, learning how to smoke. Obviously, during those two weeks without nicotine my body had somehow reset itself and was now revelling against what I had loved for so long.

On the spot I lost all interest in smoking and have not smoked since. I'm quite happy to be around smokers and I must confess I do like to walk behind someone who's smoking as I still find the smell agreeable, but I know I'll never smoke again. That part of my life is over and when it ended it felt right, natural and obvious. Like an apple falling from a tree.

Looking back now, I can see that a lot of deep changes were taking place in my life and that quite simply smoking belonged to an earlier, now outworn 'me' - the late teen/young adult level I had been stuck at even into my 40s.

People often look at quitting smoking through the wrong end of the lens. Patches, etc, are no good and won't work unless there's an inner transformation taking place. Like everything, it's fundamentally a spiritual matter and it sounds from your post that you're in exactly the right zone and smoking is becoming a former part of your life in a natural, organic way.

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Francis Berger
6/15/2019 21:21:02

Thanks for the encouraging words, John. Your experience with smoking is very similar to mine. Not only are we roughly the same age, but we even smoked for about the same amount of time - the only difference being you started and stopped a little earlier than I did (I started at 17 and stopped at 47).

I wholeheartedly agree with your observation about quitting being a transformation process involving the spirit.

My only sticking point has been creativity - nicotine is pretty good creativity fuel in my case. Nevertheless, if a great writer like you can continue to write without the smoke, then so can I!

Reply
Otto
6/16/2019 14:36:51

Instead of nicotine, try ultra high dosages of nicotinic acid (Vitamin B3) in the 1000 to 3000 mg range. Even better, Vitamin B3 in the nicotinamide (niacinamide) form.

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