When we first start smoking, we begin placing things in the mind to defend the insanity of what we’re doing. Every day that we smoke, we reinforce the insanity until eventually, it becomes a reality. Our minds work hard at first to convince us that what we’re doing is right. And over time, we become willing slaves to our own minds.
With each passing day, another tentacle of addiction is placed within us making it ever harder to quit. Eventually, there are so many tentacles that we come to believe that we can’t quit, That it would just be impossible!
We build this world one day at a time and we always include the lie within it. Soon, our perception of smoking becomes more normal than the perception of freedom. In fact, freedom is the furthest thing from our minds. But for some, a crack appears in the addiction. A place where a tentacle hasn’t yet been placed. If we’re lucky, we grab onto this crack and try to widen it, so we can peer into the other side of our addiction. The free side.
Of course the addiction responds with fear. Fear of a different world. Fear of failure. Fear of change. And the list goes on and on. Some choose to let these fears win and simply go back to planting more tentacles of addiction within themselves. Others choose to learn how to rise above this fear and perhaps enter this world that was seen in the crack of addiction.
And so we begin to entertain the idea of removing those tentacles from ourselves and we choose to take the first careful step on the path of freedom. We choose freedom over the false calm of nicotine. And so we make our plans and work toward a quit.
During this time, we begin to pull some of the tentacles of our addiction out of ourselves. The tentacles are everywhere within our minds, woven into us over the many years that we chose not to fight for freedom. And these first tentacles are hard to remove, because they’re the first steps toward a new reality.
But we begin to deny ourselves the things that seemed so normal, like smoking while driving or after a meal or using a smoke as a reward. One by one we begin to rip these tentacles out of ourselves and with each one removed, the entire monster that is our addiction becomes weaker.
When we quit, there are so many tentacles to remove at first. They seem to be tangled into everything! Like an organized mess! But on that first day, we begin to sort out the mess that is our addiction. We begin to see how we inserted each of them into ourselves and as such we learn how to remove them.
And day after day as we walk on the path to freedom, we free ourselves of more and more of those tentacles. But it took a long time to put them there, and as such it takes a while to remove them all. In fact, we always miss a couple that sneak up on us down the road, but in the end the remaining tentacles have no real power over us.
We all hold the key to removing these things. What it really takes is a desire to take that first step and then a commitment that is stronger than anything within us already. We really do forge ahead on a journey when we quit, and one by one we rip those nasty tentacles out of us until we’re free!!
That’s where the peace comes from. The realization that one by one, we took away the weapons of the addiction. One by one, we built this new world that lives on the other side of addiction and over time, there’s simply nothing left to remove.
After that, it’s really up to us to keep the addiction at bay for the rest of our lives. Once we’ve removed the bulk of the addiction, all that remains are the empty holes where our addiction once resided. And we can fill those holes with a glorious future that only freedom can create!
Fight on my friends! It’s your future that we’re talking about here! Never give up and never give in!!
ONWARD TO FREEDOM!!!
Chuck
