Officially 28 Months

Today, it is now officially a full 28 months since I laid down my beautiful, beloved pipes and pipe tobaccos.  It has been one helluva journey, if truth-be-told.  I realize and can know deep inside myself that I will FOREVER love, relish, and appreciate smoking a pipe and will always find pipe tobaccos to truly be a "nectar from the gods" form of worldly delight.  I do not think I can think of or imagine one thing I do not like about the hobby or avocation.

But, my journey away from their graceful charms has been rather unique.  What I had anticipated was that there would be a gradual downward slope in terms of the intensity of the feelings/yearnings I would have about pipes and pipe tobaccos.  Even when I started, I knew better than to imagine never thinking about pipes and pipe tobaccos.  But, I thought each day away would progressively become just a little bit easier, and that with enough time, it would be more manageable. 

Yet, that has not proven to really be the case.  While, admittedly, there has been some decline in desires, it is not a straight slope or even a parabolic downward shape.  But, instead it is a whole series of peaks and valleys.  The valley's are reasonably easy to stand firm in my resolve.  Yet, the peaks are not appreciably different than the first day I laid down the bowl of the burley filled, full bent briar pipe I last smoked 28 months ago.  I just *do not* see a logical reason for this unpredictable up spiking that occurs in my desires.  But, regardless, I have to accept that as what is apparently "normal".  Still, it does not make logical scientific sense for this to happen.  It does not make philosophical sense either.  I suspect the up-and-down vacillations are more than likely due to psychological factors.

While running this morning, after finishing my Rosary, I began to contemplate about if I had an opportunity to revisit a time in my life I would enjoy the most with my pipes, when would that be?  This is a question I thought of without specific thoughts to the major milestones of life.... so I was not trying to associate my date with things like marriages, or births, or deaths, or graduations, or transitions of any sort.  Just simply when it was the MOST pleasurable of all the pleasurable times I have had with a pipe.  Within the multiple decades I have been smoking a pipe, I narrowed my preference down to the mid 1970s into the early 1980s.  I think this period of time felt especially robust for me as a pipe smoker because a) smoking in general was still widespread enough that pipe smoking was still commonly viewed as the "special" way to be a smoker, b) yet, at that time, pipe smoking already was slightly out of the mainstream, and had a tad of an arcane and also eclectic flair to it, c) I felt established enough in my position in life that I didn't feel like a "newbie" to most things, and d) it was a period where people generally were more congenial in general and not as polarized about things, including smoking. 

I do not know where I am at, concerning my "accomplishment" of these past 28 months.  I do think about restarting with my pipes.  Especially during the last two weeks or so, it has been something I have been contemplating.  But.... I truthfully do not know. 

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