I have long surmised that people who smoke cigarettes are really just depressed. Whether they smoke cigarettes because they are depressed or depression is a side effect of cigarettes is hard to tell. It may be a bit of both. Poets can say things that science can only wordlessly point at. Depression and the depressed. The yolk and white of one egg.
Labour is blossoming or dancing where
The body is not bruised to pleasure soul,
Nor beauty born out of its own despair,
Nor blear-eyed wisdom out of midnight oil.
O chestnut tree, great rooted blossomer,
Are you the leaf, the blossom or the bole?
O body swayed to music, O brightening glance,
How can we know the dancer from the dance?
If you asked that question to a child they might think you are bonkers. Why, the tree is all of that ... the root , the stem , the leaf. the blossom. None of them by themselves are the tree, and without one of them the tree cannot exist. The tree needs the whole tree to be a tree.
Yesterday, at a smoking cessation group, i brought up the fact that nicotine is a Monoamine oxidase inhibitor. The facilitator dismissed it out of hand. She didn't want to talk about it and we weren't going to talk about it. She is a nice enough person, I guess, but doesn't have the best facilitator skills. Unfortunately. So, here I am, on the lonley trail of the monoamine oxidase inhibitor, me and William Butler Yates. And this is a clue we have found today.
Depression: the case for a monoamine deficiency. - PubMed - NCBI i am starting to think that the only successful non-smokers will be people who can squarely face depression and learn other coping methods than cigarette smoking. This may be the greatest challenge many of us will face in our lifetimes, because one of the hardest things to do in life is to change the way we think.
