It's all just people talkin'
Does it really matter what they say?
Whatever gets you through the day
That's your way
Ah, Lighthouse Family. You're forgiven if you can't hum along with that little chestnut.
But the truth is in there: whatever gets you through the day.
I have a lot of different strategies that help me keep from smoking. Almost all of them I discovered by accident and not because some website told me about them. I know, irony. Everyone loves it, but no one wants to pay for it. It's okay, I can take it. I'm going to offer one piece of advice anyway. Then I'm going to tell you a story about one of my coping strategies. The advice is simple: pay attention to what you do, notice what works (as silly, embarrassing or lame as it might be), and figure out why it works. Keeping the why close at hand is the key to making the same thing work again and again.
Now here's the story of one of my tricks, and the why that I keep close by.
Look to the right and you'll see a small label called "Vital Statistics." Underneath is the tally of cigarettes I haven't smoked since I quit. It's provided free by a little website called quitmeter and it's been my most important non-human support for the last 7 weeks. It's a very simple concept. You go to the website www.quitmeter.com and punch in some basic information: when you quit, how much you used to smoke, and how much a pack of cigarettes costs. It then calculates how long since you quit, how much money you've saved, and how many cigarettes you've not smoked.
Whenever I tell people about my little gadget, they immediately say "of course, the money you'll save!!" But that's not it for me. I really don't care how much money I've saved. What I care about is that ever running tally of cigarettes not smoked. That number keeps me coming back again and again. At first I clicked through so frequently that I witnessed almost every single increment: 6, 7, 8. YES! 8! Then I began to notice batches of 10: 56, 67, 75, 100. YES! 100! In those first single increment days, I could picture their butts in an ashtray, a full ashtray, and i could see the actual volume of ash they created. Then my mental ashtray became so full it was overflowing, piles of butts spilling out, searching for space to accommodate the next one. Then it became one of those giant coffee cans, half full, then full, overflowing with what I had not smoked.
Something in that vision truly worked for me. Something about that ever increasing number was messing with my psyche and I decided that I wanted to figure out what it was. Here is what I figured out: what that number gave me was success -- success no matter what. If I had started smoking again, the rest of the world (and a big part of me) simply would have seen it as failure. It didn't work this time, but maybe next time, right? What that number gave me could never be taken away by failure. It wouldn't matter if I started smoking again, that number would always be mine. No matter what, I would always have 7, or 12, or 30 and there was no way to turn back time and make it as though I had smoked them. That's the trick of failure isn't it? It turns back time.
Right now I measure my success in the 784 cigarettes I haven't smoked. Even if I go outside and light up right now, that is success, not failure. The rest is all just people talkin'. But 784 gets me through the day.
