A Whole Week Gone! Day 8ish (as the ability to count eludes me)…

Note - This post was written on January 16th (Saturday)

A whole week and a day has passed since I stopped smoking… and what an incredible week it has been. It feels like it’s been a lot longer than a week, actually. But, I suppose that is a good thing. The more time that appears to pass, the better I should be feeling, huh?

I started this blog on my own, and now I’m writing it for a very cool publication, Naked City Wichita… I’m really excited and have gotten some really amazing feedback from people as they’ve read through the evolution of my writing and my mindset throughout the past 3-4 weeks since I started writing. For anyone checking this out – I just want you to know how much I appreciate you taking the time to read and support this endeavor. For the 11 years that I smoked, I thought errantly that I was not addicted, that I did not need to smoke (I merely “liked it” or “loved it”), that I could quit any time without any problem, and that it wasn’t something that was going to affect me.

People talk about teenagers/young adults having that “immortality” complex… where they don’t think that anything they do is going to affect them long-term, and they certainly don’t realize that it’s going to kill them. For 19 years I didn’t smoke, and I believed that I was too mature to encounter this feeling of immortality. I didn’t realize that it would hit me subconsciously, and that it would be something that I always KNEW could cause harm.

Smokers and other addicts might not tell you – they might even state openly that “these things are going to kill me” – but the idea that this thing that you LOVE, that you need, hurting you is outside the realm of possibility. The problem lies in the exceptions – a few extremely well-known people who smoked their entire lives without ever getting sick – and you’re able to convince yourself that you are the next exception.

This feeling of infallibility, immortality, leads to continuing risky behaviors that lead to further addiction issues. So as I’m considering all of this over the past month or so, I realize that I DO indeed have a smoker’s cough again… and I don’t know how long it’s been there. I realize that before last years 5 months without smoking I was having other, more serious indications that perhaps my smoking was catching up with me. But I ignored them. I choose, consciously or not, to believe that they were false. Even though the fact, the feeling, was staring me in the face.

More on this as we continue this exploration. Leave a comment or send me questions if there are things that you would like me to talk about or just want to know more about. I’m happy to do whatever I can.

Sidebar 1 - Ruminations on the Passage of Time

I recently became a father. My first-born, Forrest, came into our lives in May 2009. During the pregnancy, as I was reading about (and mostly discussing with my wife) pregnancy, birth, and childcare I started to have some thoughts about how we perceive the passage of time.

I often hear people mention times that things trigger strong memories. During the first few weeks of the pregnancy, I noticed pictures of my parents with me when I was a baby and young child. Some of these pictures brought back memories that I didn't know existed, and one of these memories is the reason that I'm writing this.

Have you ever thought to yourself "I wish Friday would just get here already"...

Do you remember wishing that you would just grow up, when you were a child?

One of my memories was instigated by both of these statements. I was looking through pictures on a Monday evening, and wishing that I did not have to wake up for work the next morning. It reminded me of being a child and wishing that I could just be a grown-up. How long ago it seems, sometimes, that I made that wish. And now I've been out of high school for almost 12 years. When I think about the time that's passed it hardly seems possible.

The other piece of the puzzle that caused me to start considering the passage of time was looking through pictures of myself when I was a child. In those pictures I see my parents - younger than now, but still looking far more 'respectable and mature' than I feel I will look when Forrest looks at pictures of us as he is contemplating his future, his significant other, or his first child. And it was this realization that set things off inside of my mind.

What if time is not linear, as we perceive it. What if these strong memories and feelings we attribute to 'reminiscing of fonder times' are actually points at which we are closer to the moments that we previously experienced than we have been since. What if time is thematic, or relational. Times that intersect particular interests, emotions, or themes in our life are actually linked in some way that makes them more than a simple history or chronology.

This is a rudimentary design, and certainly not close to being a full theorem on the passage of time. And yet - I feel the more I think about it the closer I am to being able to state it in a way that people will understand. As a word on the tip of your tongue that you can't quite remember... it may nag at you until you figure it out. Or it may be lost to the myriad other events and sensations in life.

It is in this way that I feel that this discussion is not only interesting but also crucial. When I consider all of this within the scope of the world in which we live, it is given a new meaning. Welcome to America, the world with "the city that never sleeps", where productivity means more than FAMILY. If we could understand the importance of such close calls with our personal histories, could we not come to a greater understanding of the 'human condition'?

Okay - this is the first of many sidebars. I would love to hear your thoughts. But for now, thanks to the BSOD, I'll leave it here.