The Truth
After six years of not smoking my pipes and pipe tobaccos (except the two glorious exceptions of the Chicago trip and on my father's 100th birthday), I guess I can say I have gotten "used" to being without them. BUT, being USED to that lack of companionship is NOT the same as feeling happy or upbeat in that lack of companionship I am now USED to.
When I was a younger man, the IDEA of being away from my pipes and pipe tobaccos was not a thought that ever crossed my mind. I had always assumed they would be companions on my journey.
It feels like I am in a conundrum not of my own choosing. It feels very odd to think about how so many facets of life are vastly different in 2024 than they were in my younger days. Change of course happens, but I, perhaps naively in my youth, thought that history suggested change would drive in a positive direction by-and-large.
These were the thoughts I experienced while running this morning on the track. I had awoken from a delightfully pleasant "historical" dream and reliving of a memory from far ago of my reading an engrossing textbook as an undergraduate. I was sitting under a newly budding tree in the early Spring, smoking my pipe while being fascinated at the ideas of life awakening in me as I read this biology textbook.
PipeTobacco
4 Comments:
Pipe smoking is part of who you are, but it's up to you to decide if it's in your history and helped shape you and give you wonderful memories, or if it needs to be in your present and future. Only you can figure that out, PT.
Hi Professor - this situation is 100% of your choosing. You seemed to be happier person when enjoying your pipes. I've been reading your blog for years (and not really interacting) and have observed the steady decline of your happiness and your pining for your hobby. I'm not one to give advice but you should really consider finding a way to enjoy smoking an occasional pipe so you can get back on a path to happiness instead of torturing yourself. I was born and raised Catholic as were you so I get the whole guilt thing but you should be a bad boy sometimes.
I can picture you as an older man, returning to your pipes, but I think you are doing the right thing for now.
Professor, if you were advising one of your undergraduates about pipe smoking, in almost every case the best advice would be not to take up the pastime. But you are a different case. Like cognitive psychologist Jerome Bruner, who died in 2016 at age 100 after a lifetime of pipe smoking (he was still smoking his pipe as of a documentary filmed in 2015), pipes have been an integral part of your identity, your psyche, since your youth. You're going to do the "Catholic guilt" thing about any choice you make, whether that choice is returning to your pipes or continuing to abstain. So I hope that, for as long as you continue to abstain, you make sure that the abstaining is genuinely serving your values as well as your day-to-day happiness.
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