Good day all,
Just thought I’d check in. All in all, things are well in our little world. My new job is going well, though I really had to get in shape to perform it. Getting there as well. Since the loss of our son, we’ve been kind of in a shell of our own choosing. One that was both comforting and at the same time, confusing. We’ve given some thought to the upcoming holidays as these will be firsts for us without him. Those times when we must face things that were always comforting and yet now are different.
It’s in those kinds of moments that we can find wisdom. A way to cope with things that have changed. For us this year, we’ve decided to change our traditions. To do things on those special days a little differently simply to ease the burden that naturally comes with those firsts in our lives. As I thought of this, I realized that once again this was a problem I’d encountered before. A thing that had to be overcome in my past because you see, I was an addict. A slave to nicotine and with that slavery came the things that seemed to be normal to me, even as I created this normal with every endulgance into the addiction.
I created traditions that helped to feed my addiction with every passing day. Things that I expected to have happen such as the after dinner smoke or the coffee and cigarette on the deck in the mornings. The cigarette that gave me the confidence to walk down the road or drive. My days were filled with the traditions that I’d created as I continued defining myself by my belief in my addiction and the traditions that go with it.
And when I decided to quit, I found that for me finding ways to change those traditions was an important key to my freedom. For every time that I allowed myself a chance to smoke, I attached a kind of tradition to it. It was something that was expected in my mind not because it was written in some kind of cosmic stone but rather because that’s what I’d always done, and over time I had an expectation of this.
I found that by changing that expectation I was able to move more easily on from it and embrace something new because of it. Soon these new traditions WERE my traditions because my expectations of an event had changed. Sure it had to be learned but so too did the traditions I created in the first place. Like a holiday, the day itself is insignificant. It’s the expectation that we add to the day that makes it special, and because of this that expectation can be changed.
So never believe that your life is written in stone. Never think that what you expect to happen has to be your reality. We decide our traditions by the importance that we attach to them. To change that, all we have to do is change the expectation. Just a thought I had that I thought I’d share with all of you dedicated people.
ONWARD TO FREEDOM!!!
Chuck
