30 Months Today
It has now been a full 30 months since I laid down my pipes and pipe tobaccos.
It has been a rough day of a lot of time at the computer, fussing and messing around with all sorts of minutia trying to get the frameworks down for so much of the electronica I need to use as a sizable chunk of most of my Fall classes. I am exhausted. I am a bit frustrated. I am tired.
I would so very much like to pick up one of the pipes sitting in my pipe rack nearby me at the computer. I would so very much like to reach with the pipe in hand into the glass humidor that is roughly 2/3rds full of one of my very favorite vanilla tinctured burley pipe tobaccos. I would so very much like to bring upstairs to my office a tall tumbler sized glass of ice and pour over it several fingers of gin and fill the rest with pleasantly bitter tonic water. And then, I would relish creating a flame with my lighter and gently draw the flame into melding with the tobacco leaf that would be so gently but firmly pressed into the bowl of the pipe. To do so would, I believe, help me to find my center in this long, frustrating day.
I know I should not do the above, but at this moment I am not sure what it is I will do. The call, the desire.... it is strong.
In an earlier post this week, I alluded to the notion that I had been in what was a few weeks of relative ease regarding my pipes. When I speak of "ease" I mean that it had been a time of relatively simple patterns. I would at waking imagine smoking my pipes, and I would fall asleep with memories of smoking my pipes in the past.... but during much of the day, I would have enough easy and fun things to do, or I would have enough hard and challenging things to do... that pipes and pipe tobacco would only occasionally and mildly enter my mind.
This contrasts with the "harder" weeks. In these weeks, I tend to have a deep yearning, a deep longing to return to my pipes that permeates most of my waking hours. This was how I experienced the full first six weeks of Lent, 30 months ago when I first started this journey. As a scientist, I predicted this "harder" time would be the norm at first, but had also predicted that the feelings would go into a smooth recognizable decline.
Yet, 30 months later, I see my prediction proved false. My feelings, my thoughts, my desires for a pipe and pipe tobacco do not fit a graph showing a gradual, yet steady decline. Yes, there are times where it is "easy". Yet, there are also still times where it is as hard as on that first day of Lent, 30 months ago. My feelings, my thoughts, my desires undulate down and up, and down and up. To me, this is very surprising, and the unpredictability of and lack of a smooth progression of greater ease as more time passes was not anticipated in any way.
On the "easy" days, I feel my goal continues to be doable.
On the "harder" days, the struggle is so very palpable and real.
I do not know what I will do today. I might give in. I might hold steady.
But, this repetitive undulation.... it in itself.... feels chaotic... feels tiring.... feels dystopian.
PipeTobacco
5 Comments:
I know I should not do the above
I wish you would get away from the should/shouldn't way of looking at this. Returning to your pipes will bring one set of joys and challenges. Continuing to refrain from your pipes will bring another set of joys and challenges.
Your perfectionist tendency toward self-criticism will probably magnify the challenges and discount the joys in either case. If you go back to your pipes, you'll probably beat yourself up with so much guilt that you'll lose sight of the joys that brought you to that point in the first place. But if you continue to refrain, you'll continue to feel a sense of loss more than a sense of accomplishment.
Can your rational scientist brain help you with any of this? Thinking of the energy you spend struggling to refrain, would indulging free that energy to be used for better pursuits, or would you simply turn the "refrain" energy into "guilt" energy and be no better off? Conversely, does refraining require you to develop a "strength" that carries over into other aspects of your life where you need strength to pursue tasks that you would rather not pursue?
As I have told you several times, if my old friend is at all typical, there is every reason to think that you'll have the same strong yearnings 27 years from now that you had in your first Lent of abstaining. If you can accept that and even embrace it as part of your life-challenge, then you should be proud of yourself that you can refrain with such resolve. On the other hand, if every renewed deep yearning makes you feel that you aren't succeeding and that you are wearing yourself out wishing for an impossible outcome, maybe refraining is doing you more harm than good.
Only you can know. Please, though, don't frame your choices in terms of should/shouldn't or success/failure. You have embarked on a very personal "research project" and even if your hypothesis has been falsified you can still be a good scientist and take the right lesson from your research, whether this leads you to do so with a pipe in your mouth or your pipes in the garbage bin.
Be well, kind sir!
I echo Pat's wonderfully articulate post.
well said.
Hell, the vivid way you described lighting the pipe is probably going to prompt me to have a smoke today myself. I'm a relative newbie but inconsistent pipe-smoker. As you know, there's a lot of ritual and a bit of preparation involved the venerable art. I just can't be bothered with it some times. I have to be in JUUUUST the right mood.
ditto Pat's post. It sometimes seems your pipes have a stronger hold on your psyche now than whenyou were actively smoking.
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