Roberta has some great musings about quitting smoking. (I kicked in with some comments.)
I have long mulled the issue of smoking-related illnesses. Why don’t the threats of cancer and heart disease and emphysema have more impact on people? Why do we persist in smoking? One of my very best friends is a cancer survivor who still smokes (and when I was a smoker, I held her up as a role model whenever people nagged me).
In our modern Western culture, we fear death, not mostly as the end, but as the unknown. And I don’t mean, “What happens when you die?” as in, afterlife, reincarnation, white light. I mean as in, what does it look like, smell like, sound like. Death is away. In the hospital or hospice, in the slaughterhouse, at the vet’s, not at home or in the yard or on the farm or in our arms.
So when the threat of cancer is dangled before us, it’s just one more scary ghost in the haunted house. Not scarier than our general sense of the end of life as unknown, possibly terrifying, and probably painful. Isn’t that what we think anyway? So why is cancer actually worse than that?
It’s interesting that when most people talk about being influenced by the threat of cancer, they talk, as Roberta does, about witnessing cancer with their own eyes. (My friend, by the way, had a quick diagnosis and successful surgery, no chemo or radiation, so she skipped many of the gruesome experiential features.) Without that witnessing, that confrontation, that face-to-face this is IT I’m not scared of the unknown I’m scared of THIS, it isn’t motivating. Being scared of something real and specific is motivating, being scared of a general malaise of unknown terror just makes us shut down and deny. Which probably relates to why Bush’s constant terror-mongering is not working, but I digress.
So part of the solution feels like getting real. Not about smoking, so much as about life, death, and disease in general. Only then can we see smoking in the context in which it belongs.
We speak so about the cavalier attitude of youth — laugh about how teenagers feel immortal. Are we that different now? Many of us are, in many areas, concsious about making healthy decisions; downright pro-active regarding our health and the length and quality of our lives. But many of us are not, and most of us pick and choose our battles. So yay, I quit smoking, but I still eat that all-fat, all-sugar diet. Only lately I am buying more organics. Not giving up my coffee, but Hain’s Organic Sugar going in it. I’m so confusing.
In AA (or maybe NA?) they have a saying… you can’t scare an addict.
Remember, I did not quit smoking in June, after seeing her smoke. I quit in October, when there was a romantic gust of wind for me to ride. The fear did not motivate me. The motivation motivated me. Magic: Take it where you can get it.
“We speak so about the cavalier…”
I’m sure there is a word missing. I don’t care what the word is.
Listen, holes in the face wouldn’t have stopped me either. What actually stopped me was recognizing my own enslavement. Not fear of the future, but disgust at the present day. That I couldn’t go to sleep without being sure there was a butt for when I woke up. Couldn’t go to work without making sure there were enough butts in my purse to last me until I got home. To the point where it felt like my life was being completely run by scoring the next cigarette.
I am really going to make an effort to quit soon. For one thing, the tax is going up by $1 per pack in January, but that of course should not be my primary motivation. I get annoyed when I go out to eat and then don’t want to go anywhere else except back home for a smoke. I intentionally do not take cigs with me when I leave the house.
Konagod, that’s exactly what I mean about enslavement. You have to go certain places, do certain things, because your addiction is leading you around on a collar.