Most of us remember significant dates in our lives, birthdays, anniversaries and so on. Some dates are universal like December 7th, Pearl Harbor or June 6th, D-Day. A date very significant for me is June 5th which is my fathers birthday. Why is that so important for me, you may ask? That was the day in 1978 that I stopped smoking for good. I started smoking when I was sixteen because it was cool and it evolved into a life threatening and life distorting habit. I had stopped several times but I always returned to the habit. So why my father’s birthday? My father was a tobacco salesman I thought it a great irony to have him give me a gift on that day. One of the main impetuses was my son Peter who harassed me relentlessly about it. In retrospect it was probably the best gift my father ever gave me and he never knew it, having died several years before. But where he died at 66, I’m 91 and still going pretty strong.
I think there are two identifiable aspects to smoking. One is the nicotine addiction. The other is the relational habit. If you don’t break both habits, the ceasing will be temporary. For me, the nicotine addiction was relatively easy. All I had to do is stop cold turkey for about 3 or 4 days and the physical desire reduced almost to zero. The other one was hard. Smoking usually becomes associative in one’s life. For example, in my life I found that a cup of coffee without a cigarette, or finishing a meal without a cigarette had the strength of severe OCD. Then there was the popular cigarette after sex bit. Stress also brought out the urge. This was not the nicotine calling, it was the association of certain situations which had me reaching into my shirt pocket when I had already overcome the nicotine addiction. The life distorting evil is, where do you have to go to smoke. I estimate that I probably lost 25% of my productive time by smoking.
Statistics show that smoking will take years off your life. But if you think of smoking as two habits, not one, you can overcome the recidivism. So it will be 46 years since I’ve stopped, half my life, and I firmly believe that it may be the reason I’ve survived this long.
