To begin with, I had never been a smoker. Back in 2006, I was someone who could write posts like this, and expect all his friends who smoked, to quit smoking on reading such posts. And then within an year, in 2007, there was a post titled: Why you should smoke. Yes, I was a smoker now. Something had happened in Feb that year and I was a smoker now.
During my smoking years, I kept talking about how smoking wasn’t all that addictive and how easy it was to take short-breaks once in a while. And then one fine day, I quit smoking. So what exactly went wrong?
Before I begin, all that I write here is personal. My reasons are mine and not generic.
Smoking or not smoking is a very cultural thing if you ask me. The culture that brought me up had no space for smoking. And so I grew up assuming that smoking was not a ‘good thing’. Like a chutia I believed smoking to be a ‘bad thing’ for many many years – simply because I had been told so. Vague statistics appearing in newspapers from time to time were enough to convince me about the authenticity of my conditioned views about smoking. I never ever bothered to read a single medical journal to actually find out the truth. But then, I am happy that one day, I stopped being a conditioned chutiya. I am happy that one day, I finally took that first drag. I can never ever regret that I fagged as much as I wanted to. Fagging didn’t fuck my lungs. It never proved to be addictive. And it did not prove to be ‘injurious to health’.
Why the fuck did I quit then?
My addiction for running started demanding so much from my body that I had no space for cigarettes. That’s it. It is as simple as that. I did never need to tell myself: ‘Shit man, you are smoking too fucking much. It’s time you quit’. I am no example to someone who thinks he / she is addicted to smoking and is looking forward to get rid of the ‘bad habit’.
There were many days, when I simply didn’t have the time or energy to smoke. There were days when I had to tell myself: ‘dude, been ages since you last smoked – you should go out and grab a sutta‘. When this started happening often, I decided to simply quit smoking. Suddenly I never needed to remind myself to smoke. Suddenly there was no need to think if it was a good idea to smoke on a particular day given that there was a run scheduled for next morning. And thus, life became simpler.
When I think of it, I guess I was probably born a non-smoker and even when I tried my best to fill my lungs with smoke, I could never succeed. Every time someone tells me how cool it is that I have quit smoking, I never understand what so cool really is.