It's odd to be turning sixty because I have now been nicotine-free for as many days as I have been alive in years. I have made sixty trips around the sun and lived to tell the tale. BTW, if anyone asks, trip sixty feels no different than trip one or trip twenty. One hardly knows he's moving. This idea gave the ancients fits, BTW, which is why they believed ours was a geocentric galaxy rather than the heliocentric one we know actually exists. If we really were moving, they were certain, we woud feel it would we not?
Unlike moving through space on a big cosmic rock, however, being smoke-free for sixty days is perceptibly much, much different after even a short time span. I wake up now and my chest does not feel like it weighs eighty pounds. I do not need to take breaks every hour to "relax" I can ride my bike and not have SOP, and although I do cough occasionally, it is minor. My stress and energy levels have been strangely transformed. I have much less of the former and much more of the latter. This is not to say I am stress-free; it is to say, when I experience stress, it does not last and do not need to dash off to a dirty ashtray to cope with it.
Some stressers this week, for example, included:
- My $300.00 glasses broke at work. (They're at the shop.)
- We got a new manager. (Luckily she's nice.)
- Finding out Friday evening I had to work on Saturday. (I won't have to work another Saturday, probably, because the low number of students at "Saturday School," does not require two people to feed them. We fed only 20.)
- My refrigerator door handle came off in my hand. (It's six years old. It was an easy fix.)
- My garbage disposal finally gave out. (It's about a decade old and help is on the way.)
- And, of course, Chester had to go to the vet because he got into a scrap and got bit. (He's on a slow-release antibiotic)
It's been that kind of week. But I have also stayed busy.
As for energy. even though Saturday morning I had to work. I was done by noon and when I got home I did several chores and by 7:00 PM I was on my bike enroute to a Redbox (in 50-degrees weather, mind you, so it was a brisk but delightfully invigorating ride,) to rent a movie and buy a pint of whatever new concoction Blue Bell has come up with. Because Blue Bell and a movie is, let's face it, an excellent combo on a Saturday Night. Besides, if I was willing to brave rainy nights at 2:00 AM for cigarettes, a brisk ride to get ice cream and a DVD is a snap, believe me.
So that's how it's been. Tomorrow I'm 60 days old but still just as grateful.
Thank you for your many kindnesses,
Peace and gratitude,
AC
