Somebody reminded me recently of a post that I wrote way back when I first quit smoking titled, “choose your pain.” In it, I talked about how smokers have to choose between the pain of change and the pain of regret, and cautioned that,
if we’re not willing to endure the pain of change now, we’ll almost certainly have to endure the pain of regret later. and it will affect not only us, but all those people whose lives we touch in one way or another.
I was a little surprised that something I wrote as a brand-new quitter (I’d been quit less than a week when I wrote that post) could still be having such a profound effect on people so many years later, but I went back and re-read it just now, and I think it’s just as valid now as it was then.
I started to rewrite it to post it here, but then I thought, “why go through all that trouble?” I could spend some time polishing it now, correcting grammatical errors (or idiosyncrasies of my writing style back then, like my almost total lack of capitalization), but that wouldn’t change the core message.
I invite you to read the whole thing for yourself, and leave a comment, either here or at the “tales from the quit” site: