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Why do we smoke? Why is it that easy to quit smoking? What is smoking? What is the pleasure of smoking?
Allen Carr: My Experience with Smoking
Excerpts from: The Easy Way to Stop Smoking, Selected with an introduction by Ellopos
21 Pages
During those awful years as a smoker I thought that my life depended on cigarettes, and I was prepared to die rather than be without them. Today people ask me whether I ever have the odd pang. The answer is, 'Never, never, never' - just the reverse. I've had a marvelous life. If I had died through smoking, I couldn't have complained, I have been a very lucky man, but the most marvelous thing that has ever happened to me is being freed from that nightmare, that slavery of having to go through life systematically destroying my own body and paying through the nose for the privilege... Why had it been so ridiculously easy to stop, whereas previously it had been weeks of black depression?
Anybody can not only stop smoking but find it easy to stop. It is basically fear that keeps us smoking: the fear that life will never be quite as enjoyable without cigarettes and the fear of feeling deprived. In fact, nothing could be further from the truth. Not only is life just as enjoyable without them but it is infinitely more so in many ways and extra health, energy and wealth are the least of the advantages.
Those of you who think you enjoy a cigarette, ask yourselves why other things in life, which are infinitely more enjoyable, you can take or leave. Why do you have to have the cigarette and panic sets in if you don't?
Jaspers, Truth is in communication * Kierkegaard, My work as an author * Emerson, Reading and writing as self-knowledge * Francis Bacon, Reading & writing as moral activities * Tom Schulman, Dead Poets Society * Gibson - MacRury, The man without a face * Dostoevsky, The dream of ridiculous man
