In life, we face many hardships. Some of our own making and some that just happen. Life is never really easy as we progress on, always seeking the harmony that we know lives within us. From the moment we’re born we begin facing adversity. It’s just the nature of life. In fact, I think life would become rather boring if we didn’t have that adversiity to deal with.
But along with that adversity comes feelings. A means to feel happiness. And a way to interact with each other, and to try to understand how another person's adversity is affecting them. We do this because as humans, we also have a thing called empathy. A kind of selfless caring for another because we care. Because we want to make another's adversity better if we can.
When we face something as monumentally damaging as addiction, we tend to toss most of what we consider to be the right thing to do right out the window! We manage to kind of forget what we’re doing to ourselves in order to ingest a chemically modified plant that somehow creates a false illusion of happiness.
And we spend so long reinforcing our belief in this false contentment in order to continue on, slowly damaging ourselves as we build our wall against those who would tell us to stop murdering ourselves. We become what addiction truly is. We become a lie. We lie to ourselves and those around us in order to continue living the lie and over time we actually forget what life was life was like before the big lie.
Often I wonder what brought me around to finding the truth.To the day where I could at last see over the wall of my own making. I know I had coughing fits for quite some time every morning before I decided to quit. This helped to keep me wondering what was wrong, but still I’d continued smoking because I was firmly in the belief that the big lie was the total foundation of my life, simply because I’d forgotten about the life without the lie. I came to believe that this life of addiction was my normal life. I could no longer see the world as it was before the big lie.
Even as my dad died of throat cancer that moved to the liver due to smoking, the lie was still strong in my heart. Even as I helped him through his last sad year of life, I continued smoking, completely blinded to reality even when reality was staring me in the face.
That’s how I know how powerful this addiction really is. It’s strong enough that we morph reality to keep doing it. I think the morning I finally decided to change my reality and gain my freedom was the first morning I quit thinking about myself.
You see, It wasn’t just me who I was effecting, and on that morning I thought of those around me. My children and grandchildren. I thought about how it would look if they saw me as I saw my father. Life stolen, just as cigarettes steal lives every day. And by seeing this, I began thinking what life would be like without living this constant lie, and it seemed peaceful. It seemed clean. It just seemed so free in my minds eye.
Over the next week, I continued feeding my addiction but now it was somehow different. Now that I’d seen reality, every cigarette seemed somehow hollow. I realized that each cigarette I smoked contained it’s own lies. Every moment that I sat there, indulging in the lie I was getting ever closer to an ugly death, rather than seeking a new reality. Of course I knew I should quit. We all know what tobacco does to us
That’s when I began using the motto that ”the decisions I make today will determine what my future will look like tomorrow”. And for me, the answer to defeating this lie of my own making was to quit looking at today. Quit looking at what I’ve already done and how I feel in the moment and instead look to the future whee all of the changes I was going to make would be realized.
Over time, I found I could focus on that future more than fear it. That I still had a chance to change my future, but I also understood that time was running out!
And to make a long story short, I prepped, gathered my tools and learned to understand the lie that was my addiction. By the time I put out that last cigarette, my focus was no longer on the now. My focus was on the future and that made the journey so much easier!
The future is where our rewards lie when we choose to lose our addiction. So long as you can stay focused on a bright new future, you will find that future and I have to tell you. Every bit of freedom I could’ve imagined was there. But also there’s a kind of peace that I never imagined would be there!
And now I know that the dream I had so long ago of a bright future is now a reality and you know what? It’s a reality I never, ever intend to give up!
ONWARD TO FREEDOM!!!
Chuck
