Good day EXER’S!!
So often in our lives, there are challenges that have to be dealt with. It can be as simple as trying to figure out the bills or as complex as starting a new job. I know through a major portion of my life that I always used cigarettes as a crutch. What kind of crutch, I could never figure out and the reason is that the crutch is just another lie that we fed ourselves in order to keep smoking.
Actually, most of what we told ourselves while we smoked were lies, or as I call it, the shroud of addiction. I mean really. How does a cigarette really help us, say after a stressful meeting or while we’re driving? The truth is it doesn’t actually do a thing to help us, yet somehow we always believed that it did.
When I first thought of quitting, the first thought that ran through my mind was, “How would I cope with life, with all of the day to day events that trigger the urge to smoke a cigarette?”
And that thought scared me terribly! In fact at first I really believed that quitting would be impossible! But it’s interesting what can bring the mind to the truth. You see, every morning I’d wake up and cough for a good two hours, even as I smoked. And even then I ignored the obvious. That these cigarettes are going to kill me if I don’t stop!
There was a good month of this on again, off again thinking and the addiction always won. I was a well trained addict by my own addiction. But eventually I found a crack in my shroud of addiction. A moment when I could see things clearly and when I did, I realized that my world was ugly. It was dirty and full of lies of my own making. For a moment, I saw my future as a smoker. Tethered to oxygen lines all of the time. Unable to climb stairs or even leave the house because of what my addiction had done to me. I could see my children and grandchildren and the sadness they felt as they watched me slowly fade away, still smoking to the last breath when death takes me.
And then the crack slammed shut and for another week or two, I simply ignored all of the thoughts of that day of discovery simply because I knew that believing what I saw could end the hold my addiction had on me. And then one day, I realized that I’d seen a vision of the future and realized right at that moment that this vision of my future wasn’t static. That I could change it. That it might not be to late.
That’s really how my quit journey began. A slow period of discovery and for a single moment, an honest vision of the reality that I would face if I didn’t change things. And on the day that I did actually quit, I could see a new future. One where I could share my love with my grandchildren and one where I could see my family but this time it was all smiles! I’d lifted the shroud of my addiction to see the reality that was always there and that was really all it took.
That was the day that I realized that what I do today will determine what my future will look like tomorrow, and on that day I chose the bright future over the dirty, sad, ugly one.
It can be hard to lift the shroud of addiction and see things as they really are. That’s because it took us a long time to create this shroud. This mist that distorts reality was built by our own minds one day at a time in order to continue feeding the addiction.
And when we quit, the shroud is still there but we get glimpses through it, which causes confusion and frustration. We want our old life back and know we can’t have it. But slowly, the shroud is lifted and we can begin to see this new future that awaits us. We begin to want our new lives more than we want our addiction. We want to be free more than anything!
And then the journey becomes easier for you see, all along we just had to learn that our addiction was nothing but a lie. That our futures will be bright because we chose to make them that way.
Your future awaits you! All you have to do is prove by your actions how you want that future to look. . .
ONWARD TO FREEDOM!!!
Chuck
