“The free man owns himself. He can damage himself with either eating or drinking. He can ruin himself with gambling. If he does he is certainly a damn fool…but if he may not, he is not a free man any more than a dog.”
- G.K.CHESTERTON
Thursday 23 July 2009
Wednesday 8 July 2009
"The only pleasure I get in life" : Mid Life Re-assessment Of Priorities #257
After 36 years, 328 500 cigarettes and over $90 000, I stopped smoking 3 weeks ago today and haven't looked back. I've had a love-hate relationship with cigarettes for most of my life, quit 3 times for over a year and just kept going back to 'em...last time I quit would have been over a decade ago now, and I've probably got through several hundred dollars in patches, lozenges and gum since then, all to no avail and within hours I've been smoking again. I've said for years that i love smoking, that if it didn't kill you I'd smoke a hundred a day. I think I meant it at the time. I switched to rolling my own back in '02 when I was low on money, and that helped...I smoked less, spent less, and enjoyed it more...but as the years kept rolling by, as years are wont to do, I wasn't quite as sure as I'd been in the past that I could "quit whenever I wanted to"...
I've been pretty happy about turning 50...for me, it's a lot like a badge of rank, you've paid some dues, you've earned some scars and rited a few passages, and unless you're real lazy or completely brain-dead, there's half a chance that you may have picked up a little wisdom along the way....I had seen 50 coming for a while, and it just didn't phase me - I'd thought a few years ago that it might - the closer it got, the more it looked like a reasonable impersonation of a rare kind of watershed....time to step over a line or two and set myself up to enjoy the hell out of the next few decades.
I thought a lot about what I wanted to give myself for my birthday, what I really wanted to mark the occasion...some were semi-reasonable, others were "If I won the lottery" stuff...I chose Life...yeah, it sounds corny, but it was the answer that just jumped out in front of the headlights and wouldn't get out of the way...
It occurred to me that I don't have much of a Bucket List, really, not any more...ticked all the standard family/mortgage/career boxes, several times over, got the three greatest kids in the world to show for it....and been lucky enough to get a lot of the other stuff done, too....I've been accused of having a mid-life crisis since I was in my late twenties...it's not a term that works for me...none of the stuff I've done over the last 25 years has been done with a crisis mentality, not from where I've been standing - it just took me a little longer getting around to some things than others, that's all there's been to it...the bikes, the tattoos, the travelling, the ending and beginning of relationships, sex, drugs, rock n' roll...shit, I've been doing all that stuff pretty much consistently since the '70s....there's a few places in the world I'd still like to see, with Nepal, Africa and South America at the top of the list...they cost more money than I have right now, so travel for the next couple of years looks like being road trips around the US, Canada and Mexico on the Harley....one of these days, I'll get around to learning the guitar or the harmonica....probably....I wouldn't mind brushing up my French and German, maybe a little more Thai....it would be nice to be at basic conversational level in something other than my native tongue...now I live in America maybe I should learn Spanish....I wouldn't mind taking up tai chi again, it's been a while and the local high school has classes.....but overall, I've pretty much done everything I have dreamed of since I was old enough to realise that you can make your own dreams come true...from here on in, it's all gravy, really....
Before I left Australia in early 2007, I packed my most important treasures in cardboard boxes and left them with my long-suffering daughter to keep an eye on until I sent for them, if and when I ever settled down in one place...I had them sea-mailed here to the States earlier this year, and the last one arrived in mid June...in among the usual detritus that I'd forgotten I had, was a book that a friend sent me when they moved across continents themselves, 3 1/2 years ago...the book was Allen Carr's 'Easy Way To Stop Smoking'...I'd been meaning to get around to reading it, and it was weird that I had chosen, out of all the dozens of books I sold or gave away back in 2007, to keep this one....
'Giving up smoking' hasn't really been very high on the To-Do list for the last 10 years, although it's been there....for as long as I can remember, I've thought that 70 wasn't a bad age to live to...besides being our biblically allotted three-score-and-ten, I figure if you haven't got it done by 70, you probably ain't going to....and the idea of being old and infirm doesn't really do it for me, regardless of how many more years I'm around, I don't want to be sick...so, I figured on maybe making 75 tops, which is why when I hit 50 I saw it as being the 2/3 waypoint, which made it an even bigger milestone....and I think that's when I realised that if the home stretch in front of me offers as much chaos and opportunity as the last quarter century has, I'd really better think of getting back in shape a bit....it's just time, you know?
I started the book before I finished unpacking. I loved that the first instruction was NOT to quit smoking while reading the book. Big fat bonus, I put my feet up and smoked like a chimney the rest of the evening. I had a whole box of Nicorettes, half an old pack of lozenges, and a handful of old nicotine patches lying around the house, so I figured WTF?, I might as well read the book and think about quitting in the next week or two....well, I'm not going to pre-empt the book, but if you're really thinking of not smoking again for the rest of your lucky days, well, all I can say is that this book had me stopped in the day and a half it took me to read it....for the first time in a long time, I'm starting to think of a whole bunch of stuff I'm going to be able to do that I know I couldn't do if I kept smoking....
Anyway, it's time for lunch...I bought a thick cut piece of sirloin, which I've just fried up with some onions and eggs, and I'm gonna wash the whole thing down with the 6-pack of Heineken I grabbed at the supermarket this morning....I've heard it's bad for you to make too many lifestyle changes at once, and I'm taking that advice seriously....
I've been pretty happy about turning 50...for me, it's a lot like a badge of rank, you've paid some dues, you've earned some scars and rited a few passages, and unless you're real lazy or completely brain-dead, there's half a chance that you may have picked up a little wisdom along the way....I had seen 50 coming for a while, and it just didn't phase me - I'd thought a few years ago that it might - the closer it got, the more it looked like a reasonable impersonation of a rare kind of watershed....time to step over a line or two and set myself up to enjoy the hell out of the next few decades.
I thought a lot about what I wanted to give myself for my birthday, what I really wanted to mark the occasion...some were semi-reasonable, others were "If I won the lottery" stuff...I chose Life...yeah, it sounds corny, but it was the answer that just jumped out in front of the headlights and wouldn't get out of the way...
It occurred to me that I don't have much of a Bucket List, really, not any more...ticked all the standard family/mortgage/career boxes, several times over, got the three greatest kids in the world to show for it....and been lucky enough to get a lot of the other stuff done, too....I've been accused of having a mid-life crisis since I was in my late twenties...it's not a term that works for me...none of the stuff I've done over the last 25 years has been done with a crisis mentality, not from where I've been standing - it just took me a little longer getting around to some things than others, that's all there's been to it...the bikes, the tattoos, the travelling, the ending and beginning of relationships, sex, drugs, rock n' roll...shit, I've been doing all that stuff pretty much consistently since the '70s....there's a few places in the world I'd still like to see, with Nepal, Africa and South America at the top of the list...they cost more money than I have right now, so travel for the next couple of years looks like being road trips around the US, Canada and Mexico on the Harley....one of these days, I'll get around to learning the guitar or the harmonica....probably....I wouldn't mind brushing up my French and German, maybe a little more Thai....it would be nice to be at basic conversational level in something other than my native tongue...now I live in America maybe I should learn Spanish....I wouldn't mind taking up tai chi again, it's been a while and the local high school has classes.....but overall, I've pretty much done everything I have dreamed of since I was old enough to realise that you can make your own dreams come true...from here on in, it's all gravy, really....
Before I left Australia in early 2007, I packed my most important treasures in cardboard boxes and left them with my long-suffering daughter to keep an eye on until I sent for them, if and when I ever settled down in one place...I had them sea-mailed here to the States earlier this year, and the last one arrived in mid June...in among the usual detritus that I'd forgotten I had, was a book that a friend sent me when they moved across continents themselves, 3 1/2 years ago...the book was Allen Carr's 'Easy Way To Stop Smoking'...I'd been meaning to get around to reading it, and it was weird that I had chosen, out of all the dozens of books I sold or gave away back in 2007, to keep this one....
'Giving up smoking' hasn't really been very high on the To-Do list for the last 10 years, although it's been there....for as long as I can remember, I've thought that 70 wasn't a bad age to live to...besides being our biblically allotted three-score-and-ten, I figure if you haven't got it done by 70, you probably ain't going to....and the idea of being old and infirm doesn't really do it for me, regardless of how many more years I'm around, I don't want to be sick...so, I figured on maybe making 75 tops, which is why when I hit 50 I saw it as being the 2/3 waypoint, which made it an even bigger milestone....and I think that's when I realised that if the home stretch in front of me offers as much chaos and opportunity as the last quarter century has, I'd really better think of getting back in shape a bit....it's just time, you know?
I started the book before I finished unpacking. I loved that the first instruction was NOT to quit smoking while reading the book. Big fat bonus, I put my feet up and smoked like a chimney the rest of the evening. I had a whole box of Nicorettes, half an old pack of lozenges, and a handful of old nicotine patches lying around the house, so I figured WTF?, I might as well read the book and think about quitting in the next week or two....well, I'm not going to pre-empt the book, but if you're really thinking of not smoking again for the rest of your lucky days, well, all I can say is that this book had me stopped in the day and a half it took me to read it....for the first time in a long time, I'm starting to think of a whole bunch of stuff I'm going to be able to do that I know I couldn't do if I kept smoking....
Anyway, it's time for lunch...I bought a thick cut piece of sirloin, which I've just fried up with some onions and eggs, and I'm gonna wash the whole thing down with the 6-pack of Heineken I grabbed at the supermarket this morning....I've heard it's bad for you to make too many lifestyle changes at once, and I'm taking that advice seriously....
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