Mind over matter.
If you hear a smoker tell you he can’t get smoking out of his system, don’t believe him.
Chances are he is merely rationalizing his addiction.
Despite the efforts of governments in many parts of the world to discourage cigarette smoking, thousands, if not millions, of their citizens cannot drop the bad habit completely.
Despite the increase in local taxes, I still see smokers pitifully scrounging inside their pockets pennies to buy a stick of their favorite cigarette brand, inhale its toxic ingredients and then exhale them to the detriment of non-smoking public around.
I say again: this is a case of mind over matter.
I had smoked for 25 straight years. Since I was twelve, an older classmate lured me to share a puff of the then very popular non-filter Philip Morris brand.
Though I coughed and spit out the odd taste in my first experience, I did not know that it would make me addicted to cigarette smoking.
My parents did not know I had been hooked during my entire secondary school years. When I stepped into college, they no longer bothered themselves nor my older siblings to remind me of the consequences of smoking.
I moved to LA, CA., in the mid-eighties where I was able to get rid of the vice. How?
As my brother and I were visiting UCLA Hospital where his son was confined for asthma, I was drawn to bright photos of cancer-stricken patients due to smoking.
A nurse dutifully explained to me that the cancer lesions are so ugly one might not lose his appetite to eat after seeing those horrifying photos where the reddish-colored lesions appeared inside the throat and esophagus area, the lips, the gums and the lungs.
They were so ugly I almost threw up. The nurse handed me a candy.
The following day, I threw my pack of Salem filters into the trash bin.
But, as all smoking withdrawals adversely affect a person’s demeanor, the urge to sniff even just one puff was great. My throat was dried up and I felt thirsty every minute.
Some fellow smokers who tried giving it up backslid after just a few weeks because they could not resist the temptation of heaving a “sigh of relief” after a good puff.
But I persisted, because I felt then that it was a battle between mind and matter.
My mon was happy when she got the news. She said I should slice a round piece of ginger and treat it like a lollipop in my mouth to prevent my throat from feeling the “dryness.”
So I did regularly.
And then I thought that if I saved my cigarette money (I consume a pack everyday for $1), I would have accumulated $365 in a year. By assumption, multiply that by 10 years, that would total $3650 which, by any stretch of the imagination, was already a hefty sum in those days!
The peso-dollar exchange rate in those days was P20 to $1.
Thus, I also developed the habit of saving money. I crumpled a dollar bill daily and threw it, like a basketball, into an empty ice-cream carton by my bedside.
Days, weeks, months and several years passed, and wow, I was free of the smoking addiction completely. That has been 32 years ago today.
Wasn’t that an amazing victory?
I still practice the daily savings habit by setting aside P100 every day and put the P3000 monthly total in my savings account.
Instead of literally throwing away in smoke P15 of your hard-earned money for just 3 sticks of your favorite cigarettes daily, save those pesos and watch your savings accumulate and grow.
Mind always prevails over matter. Kick smoking out of your system today! (Email your feedback to fredlumba@yahoo.com.) Jn. 12:44: “When a man believes in me, he does not believe in me only but in the one who sent me.” GOD BLESS THE PHILIPPINES!
