Better Stop Smoking

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What a fitting heading for my big plunge into actually recording that I am giving up smoking.  Well in fact I have been giving up now for 8 weeks and 2 days and about 20 hours and have been doing a really bad job of it.

I want to stop.  I read Allen Carr’s “Easy Way to Stop Smoking”, then I took Zyban, then Champix (like I am taking now) and I have done all these things several times.  The most important thing is that it is stopping, not giving up.  I am not giving up anything.  I suppose that is why I have not used patches because then I would not be giving up anything, I would just be replacing the induction method.  However, Allen Carr has said the thing that I can’t get out of my head….

“Smoking is like beating your head up against a wall so that when you stop it feels good”

I wrote in my journal on 14/6/2013 (which interestingly enough has an entry that says I’ve just smoked the last one!!) the reasons why I was STOPPING:

  • I hate smelling like cigarettes
  • I can’t get fit
  • I cough as the last thing every night when I get into bed
  • It is costing a fortune
  • It will make me an invalid
  • It socially isolates me
  • It will make me happier
  • It will make my wife and my kids happy
  • I wont feel sick from smoking
  • I will stop doing something which doesn’t add to my life

This is a good list that I should read each day.  I really want to STOP SMOKING.

It comes down to something else I wrote in my journal and it applies to a lot of the things that I write:  “Stop doing things that do not add to your life.”

I will not give up giving up…

 

Better at Work – Life

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I was getting pretty sick of hearing about work life balance a few years ago, mainly by people who were afraid to work and their balance was how much life I can fit into all the time I was supposed to be working.

I also thought the saying “I work to live, not live to work” was degrading to whatever work that person was attempting to avoid that day – they always appeared to me to be the people in my work who were striving for mediocrity.

So I thought about it and decided that work life balance is actually bullshit – it’s just called LIFE.

Apparently work is not a new thing!  The only difference is that historically work was what gave you life – you didn’t work in planting your crops and harvesting them, you didn’t eat and then you died.  Work then was not about ‘my leisure time’ but about my survival.

The reason that I am writing this today is I was in the car today listening to the radio and I suddenly hear some professor talking about “Work Life Integration”.  Apparently our executives of today are finding that they are becoming disconnected with their families and that a balance doesn’t exist because work and life take up too much time.  Apparently they need to be integrated so they get the right amount of attention.

This may not be the answer but maybe it clarifies the idea that you don’t have to work to live but you have to live to work.

 

Mindfulness

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Well I suppose I had to get to this.

This is really where things started for me… or is it better to say this is where I suddenly realised where I was, when I was.  I didn’t get a profound meaning of life revelation, or suddenly have some awakening.

One day I just understood.  I think it actually snuck up on me.

I tell a story, that eventually we all end up sitting in a chair, watching days of our lives, pissing our pants and waiting for the fortnightly (sometimes) reluctant visits from your family.  But that is the future and this is now.

So I’ve started to build my mindfulness pages and hope I can actually write with some sense of order and explanation… and dare I say it insight….

 

Better People

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I spent most of the week thinking I can’t work out why people do things;  why is there so much confrontation, bitterness and such a toxic environment in my work.   I have never been able to work out what motivates people to strive for more, when they have everything; to suppress people they already have power over;  and what motivates people to have more and more of something they could never possibly use (power or money).

I am writing this post after a particularly hard week which changed in the blink of an eye.

I was driving along gripping the steering wheel a bit too hard, in heavy traffic in the city, ruminating about something that I now can’t remember – but I can tell you I was right about my ruminating, I knew I was right because I was angry about it!  Every wrong that had happened to me in the past was flashing into my head in the stop-go traffic.  I was the only decent driver on the road at the time and all the pedestrians should have been driving because their presence on the road was shitting me.  I was profiling and judging everyone, past, present and future – all bad.

I noticed a very well built middle eastern man walking along the street (muscles from steroids I surmised) wearing a tight T-shirt (which was too tight and just his way of being a complete poser).  He stopped at a sausage sizzle (I remembered, I hate sausage sizzles as the sausages are always cold and overcooked and the onions aren’t cooked enough) and bourght a sausage in bread (so much for the healthy body builder diet) and walked off down the footpath.

I was just about to lose interest (he had shit me enough already) when he hesitated as he passed a homeless guy who was sitting on the footpath.  The homeless guy had a small sign which they guy stopped to read.  He then took half a pace to walk away and stopped again.  He then turned back and handed the homeless guy the sausage in bread he had just bought.  The homeless guy smiled and nodded and the meat headed body builder in the tight T-shirt who seconds before I had hated for no reason, became a Saint.  I didn’t see the face of the bodybuilder guy as he walked off, but I am sure it was a whole lot better than the face I had looked at him with.

I didn’t see the lights change a first as I must have got something in my eye as they were a bit watery.

Just when I am not being the better man, I see the better man walking down the street.

Maybe looking for the better man is not always about looking inwards and making it all about me.  My bad week, just became a good day.

 

Better Perspective

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I had a hard weekend where I wasn’t a better man.

I was feeling sorry for myself, regretful and as per usual mainly angry.

When my friend called.

His mother was in ICU and had a massive heart attack and needed open heart surgery for a by pass but wasn’t strong enough to be transferred.  He was upset.  He is the anchor in his family and was holding it up for everybody.  I was proud that he called me.  Today his Mum had the surgery and it was not really looking too good.  I went down to the hospital, I hugged my friend and he cried on my shoulder.

I got my perspective back.

He called me tonight and said his Mum was still in ICU but serious but stable and things were looking up.  He thanked me again for being his mate: LYLAB he said.

Love You Like a Brother

Better at Karaoke

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To get this post into perspective you have to understand that it is my wife who loves Karaoke.  (I mean loves!!)

When we first got together she sat me down and with grave conviction and great seriousness told me she loved Karaoke and would not give it up for anything.  I accepted this as a part of her  – only if I’d known!

My wife sang me a song for our wedding as her speech.  Don’t get me wrong she is a great singer, but Karaoke is not all about singing for my wife; it is about parties, socialising and involvement, no matter what you skill level.

My wife has an annual Karaoke Birthday Party (one of many excuse parties to sing Karaoke) and through this has her own Karaoke set up, including PA, speakers (the speakers are my fault I bought them in a moment of weakness one christmas – she loves them!) and a library of over 600 songs which is growing constantly.

To my wonderful wife this is not just a hobby it’s a passion and a true part of her life.

I remember when she told me that she would not give it up at the start of our relationship and my naive reply of “No problems, I would never make you give up something you love”

Well over the years the sounds in our lounge room masquerading as singing has taken it’s toll.  Most parties now I have what my wife calls the ‘anti-Karaoke movement’ of displaced husbands, wife’s, friends and children who sit out the back with me during the parties in an attempt to avoid the worst of it.  It is a happy balance.

My wife’s Karaoke reputation is far and wide.  Recently she was invited by a friend to run a Karaoke evening a a local football club – she jumped at the chance; but there was a catch.  It was the first ‘public’ one my wife had done and she needed my ‘technical support’ in case something went wrong.

So……

I started to write this post a few days after the Karaoke night.  I started it on my ipad but couldn’t get it all to work properly, so some further days on I am writing it on my computer. My first unfinished post about being better at Karaoke which I stopped mainly through technical issues, actually hit a bigger hurdle and that was, it is hard to write about being better when in actual fact I was not doing anything better.

In helping my wife in her first and somewhat nervous hosting of the football club Karaoke night I constantly let it known I was doing it under sufferance.  I went down to the football club in the days before for a test run and was snappy, begrudgingly helpful and constantly espoused my reluctant involvement in something I thought was stupid.  On the night I wasn’t much better until I found out me, as the ‘roadie’ got free beer all night.

Nothing went wrong and the night was a resounding success which I basked in.

It is pretty easy to write about being a better man.  It is a whole lot different looking at moments when there is no attempt in that goal, your mantras were songs of protest and a moment when you could have shined is another in a long list of stuff when you didn’t behave better, you just behaved the same.

But…..

This time you saw it,
This time you noticed it,
This time it was not just about regret,
It is about change,

It is about being a better man.

Better at Bad Weeks

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I had a bit of a bad week, that, didn’t turn out to be that bad.

At the moment by biggest worry is worrying about why I am not worrying.

I had to have a sit down and think about this a bit.  It came down to a number of things that I have had as my mantra for a while, the most important being:

BE PEACEFUL

It is pretty hard to be peaceful when shit is rolling down hill and you suddenly realise you live in a valley.  But peaceful is what I decided to be this week.  I say this at lot lately… “I decided” because I think this is the thing that we forget to do a lot.  I am pretty tired of thinking that other people are responsible for how I feel; because if you do that you lose control of your life.  It is my decision as to wether I am going to be peaceful or not.  This week that is what I decided, again and again, when the peace was slipping from me.

As a result I hit the weekend and looked back over my week.  I found that although the week was not a highlight in my year I was better in a bad week than sometime I am in good weeks.

I think it was all to do with how I looked at it; and more importantly how I decided to respond to it.

I think it’s am achievement to be a better man in bad weeks – and I’m going to take the credit.

 

Better at Adversity

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Adversity has the same effect on a man that severe training has on the pugilist: it reduces him to his fighting weight.  (Josh Billings,  1818 – 1885)

Some days when you are planning for the future, the past comes and slaps you in the face.  Often what you think you got over, to get to where you are now, just got piled up in front of you… but, much bigger, much steeper, full of barbs and traps.

Maybe though, the barbs are just regret and the traps are ones you set for yourself a long time again.

But, no matter what, adversity grinds you down.  It’s just a matter of how you look at it when you get to the last of your strength.  Has it reduced you to your real fighting weight or are you going to chuck in the towel.

…… and I think it comes down to one thing: character.