Counting Flowers on the Wall

The hard part, the really hard part about giving up cigarettes, is not so much giving up the cigarettes as giving up everything you've always done with cigarettes....or at least getting use to doing them without smoking.

Take mornings for instance. I'd always start my morning off with coffee and a few smokes. Now, I just have my coffee and stare dumbly into space while my right hand makes automatic movements to grab a non-existent pack and lighter. I drink coffee, I want a cigarette. I don't drink coffee, I want a cigarette even more. I want one if I check my email. I want one when I write on my blog. I want one if I read the paper. I want one when I turn on the TV. Thank goodness Captain Kangaroo is no longer on the air in the morning.

This is what makes giving up this particular addiction so difficult. If you've smoked for years, cigarettes become entrenched in virtually every aspect of your life. Take the cigarettes away and you're left with a lot of holes in your day and each and every one of them is a pit to fall back into relapsing. The real work in recovery is filling those holes...quickly. Leave them there for long and they will refill themselves with what use to be there. That is a fact that I've learned from the experience of several prior attempts.

Now, don't tell my I've nothing to do.