Many of us Exers in the US are celebrating the holiday in honor of Dr. Martin Luther King, jr. I read the entire text of his “I Have a Dream” speech, which is quite magnificent. I read it twice because the language, the imagery, the rhetoric, and the message are all so powerful. WOW.
I digress.
I was thinking about the reasons each of us has to quit smoking. Our health, our looks, and/or our pocketbooks are prominent reasons stated for wanting to quit smoking. Underlying all of these reasons, though, is the idea that we are NOT FREE. We are chained to nicotine by a powerful addiction. We are so chained to nicotine, in fact, that we have to be powerfully motivated by our other concerns to even attempt to give it up.
If we were free, we wouldn’t need reasons to quit. If we were free, we would just think to selves, “I don’t want to smoke” and we wouldn’t smoke. In fact, if we were truly free, we wouldn’t even think about smoking. Right? How much time does the non-smoker-never-has-smoked think about smoking? NEVER. They spend zero seconds of every day thinking about, planning for, or avoiding smoking. None.
Smokers are not free. We are not free and we did it to ourselves.
Break the chains
Keep the quit
PT
