Good morning EXer’s!!
I hope all is going well for you. Me? I’ve been pretty busy with work and in my spare time, a little work on the yard even though here in the mountains it’s still a little early. But I’ve always believed that preparation is a key to success. That a strong foundation will support anything that we wish to achieve.
So often in life we find ourselves running blindly into a new situation only to find out that we didn’t do it right or that with a little more thought we might’ve done it differently. And in the end we have to take the knowledge that we learned the hard way and apply it to our situation in order to get where we want to be.
I think that when we quit smoking, the preparation doesn’t end on the day we quit. It might seem like it does because now we’re living the new life that we prepared for. But to decide that the period of preparation is over can be a mistake I think.
For me, each day of my quit was an opportunity to improve the next day, and it still is. To take the knowledge gained by experience and use that knowledge as a foundation for the next day. To use our newly found wisdom as a means of continuing to progress. Because though it’s a journey, it still takes a desire to maintain it as if it were a living thing. A thing that we want to keep with us at all times. A thing so precious that we refuse to let any harm come to it.
So, what I’m trying to say is that when we quit, the learning never stops. Every crave that we beat teaches us a little more about how to survive the next one. Every trigger that we take the power away from is another cornerstone in the foundation of our entire quits. And so long as we continue to learn our addictions through experience, then eventually the addiction itself becomes powerless to influence us.
Always stick to that commitment and try with each day to build for the next. A quit is a precious thing that has to be nurtured so that it can grow from a discomfort to a life of freedom and peace. Like a flower that we plant in the spring. At first we watch it sprout and then as it grows into a plant, we begin to discover what insects might harm it or perhaps along the way we discover a disease that must be overcome. But we learn these things and apply them to the plant, allowing it to grow ever stronger both by it’s internal desire to live and by the careful nurturing that we give it.
In the end and over time, we realize our dream as the first precious blooms begin to appear. This is when all of our thought and hard work pays off. So too is our quits. We must tend to it every day, almost as if it’s a living thing. We must learn every day how to change the nature of the next day in order to give our quits the fertilizer that it needs while always remembering the beautiful flower that we’re creating with each day that we walk the path to freedom.
Stay true to yourself and continue learning and soon you will be on the other side of your addiction. You will have created a beautiful flower inside simply by learning and sticking to the endless plan that is our quits. And if you start now, then by the next spring, you’ll be living the freedom that you long for. You’ll be finding life to be so much more precious free of the distractions of addiction. But it has to start somewhere. There has to be a day when that seed is planted and from there, the rest is all up to you . . .
ONWARD TO FREEDOM!!!
