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Share your quitting journey

Mystery, Chance or for a reason

JonesCarpeDiem
2 6 68

      When the 2007 recession hit, work slowed way down, like, to nothing.

      By 2009, it hadn't gotten much better. We were asked to leave the home we had rented for 18 years so the landlords son could be close to UCLA.

      My wife's family was in bad shape. She had been spending a lot of time in Michigan taking care of them beginning in 2007 while I stayed home, looking for work.

      We ditched a lot of stuff in March of 2009. I put my tools in a storage unit so I could work when there was work, put my instruments and household items in an adjoining unit and moved into a room in a house whose backyard adjoined a huge cemetery. My daughter had been living with her future husband for a couple years. Together she and my wife had placed all but half a dozen cats of 22 we had before we moved. My wife moved to Michigan to see her family go, one by one. We spoke again for the first and last time at our daughters wedding in 2013. 

      When you MUST consolidate, you get rid of a lot of stuff, keep what you think you will need and, discard the rest.

      One day when I was at my storage unit putting some tools away from that days work, a man came up to me and asked me to take a very fancy table his father had made. He had no place for it and he wanted someone who would appreciate the workmanship of his fathers hands to have it.

      That table is beside my bed, the mystery of chance or there for a reason. 

Quitting smoking doesn't happen by chance. Quitting smoking is no mystery.

As you invest yourself in your quit, your quit grows.

Simple, yes?

6 Comments
About the Author
Hello, My name is Dale. I was quit 18 months before joining this site and had participated on another site during that time. I learned a lot there and brought it with me. I joined this site the first week of August 2008. I didn't pressure myself to quit. HOW I QUIT I didn't count, I didn't deny myself to get started. When I considered quitting (at a friends request to influence his brother to quit), I simply told myself to wait a little longer. No denial, nothing painful. After 4 weeks I was down to 5 cigarettes from a pack a day. The strength came from proving to myself, I didn't need to smoke because I normally would have smoked. Simple yes? I bought the patch. I forgot to put one on on the 4th day. I needed it the next day but the following week I forgot two days in a row I put one in my wallet with a promise to myself that I would slap it on and wait an hour rather than smoke. It rode in my wallet my first year.There's nothing keeping any of you from doing this. It doesn't cost a dime. This is about unlearning something you've done for a long time. The nicotine isn't the hard part. Disconnecting from the psychological pull, the memories and connected emotions is. :-) Time is the healer.