The hardest step to take is usually the first, after that most people get the hang of it very quickly.
This is true for virtue... as it is for vice.
In the beginning all things corrupt were once honest. And like a drop of black ink in a bucket of milk – once tainted there is never again pure purity. Yet people take to vice so much quicker than they do to virtue – in it for the short term gain rather than the long term benefit.
I once heard that the difference between Angel Cake and Devil Cake is in the taste. How many figured that the Devil cake tastes better? Its like we are programmed from a very early age to believe that what is really bad can actually feel really good.
Tomorrow is World No Tobacco Day - the big day for the anti-smoking lobby to drum its message over the rooftops and across the world. But ask a unrepentant smoker how easy is it to stop smoking and he'll probably say that “stopping is easy, its the staying off that's the hard part.”
In fact, millions and millions of smokers do stop smoking every day... at the end of their cigarette (and they do it as many as 20 or 40 times each day).
I think every smoker had a sense of foreboding before he (or she) first lit up and a sense of death at the first inhalation of the smoke (pouring soot into a pair of lungs would have that quite an affect on it). Yet many light up again after they have hacked and coughed their way through the first cigarette.
Some do it being mollycoddled with false sense of bravado and manhood, others to emulate a parent or role model – most continue to do so due to peer pressure or environment or popular notions (such as 'deep' men use cigarettes for silent contemplation, for example). In many countries growing a moustache incidentally is viewed as a sign of manhood - real men wear moustaches.
Same logic applies that tough guys smoke... or at least used to. Most of them are probably part of the WHO statistic that accounts for nearly 6 million deaths from tobacco use and exposure to tobacco smoke every year(the WHO actually counts one death every six seconds).
Another statistic claims that smoking cigarette shortens a life by 11 minutes (a statistic that I find bordering on purely speculative because it cannot really be trusted without proof of divine insight). Who makes this stuff up?! By that calculation a man who smokes 20 cigarettes a day reduces his lifespan by 5 days each month, or two months each year.
Yet medics claim that the lungs start to recover minutes after someone stops smoking and that the lung can recover completely with 2 years of first giving up. Ask a 80 year old smoker what he would do with two more years to live. If he hasn't given it up by then, he'd probably use the two extra years to smoke some more.
Not to belittle the WHO statistic, I think the information about deaths related to “tobacco use and exposure to tobacco smoke” also indirectly advocates that people caught in a room with a bunch of smokers ought to light up themselves because they are going to die anyway just by the exposure (talk about literally paying for the sins of the father! A bit too biblical, isn't it?)
Couple that with the fact that some studies indicate that second hand smoke is WORSE than smoking itself and you have a scenario that advocates smoking to save from suffering the greater risk from exposure.
In my view most smokers continue to be such even when confronted by the detriments of the vice solely because they can't help themselves... and because it feels soooooooo good. In other words they are weak and are shallow – far removed from the tough and contemplative image that they had hoped to project.
There are some battles you can't win in the end (after all no one gets out of this life alive) – giving up smoking might be a start.
This is true for virtue... as it is for vice.
In the beginning all things corrupt were once honest. And like a drop of black ink in a bucket of milk – once tainted there is never again pure purity. Yet people take to vice so much quicker than they do to virtue – in it for the short term gain rather than the long term benefit.
I once heard that the difference between Angel Cake and Devil Cake is in the taste. How many figured that the Devil cake tastes better? Its like we are programmed from a very early age to believe that what is really bad can actually feel really good.
In fact, millions and millions of smokers do stop smoking every day... at the end of their cigarette (and they do it as many as 20 or 40 times each day).
I think every smoker had a sense of foreboding before he (or she) first lit up and a sense of death at the first inhalation of the smoke (pouring soot into a pair of lungs would have that quite an affect on it). Yet many light up again after they have hacked and coughed their way through the first cigarette.
Some do it being mollycoddled with false sense of bravado and manhood, others to emulate a parent or role model – most continue to do so due to peer pressure or environment or popular notions (such as 'deep' men use cigarettes for silent contemplation, for example). In many countries growing a moustache incidentally is viewed as a sign of manhood - real men wear moustaches.
Same logic applies that tough guys smoke... or at least used to. Most of them are probably part of the WHO statistic that accounts for nearly 6 million deaths from tobacco use and exposure to tobacco smoke every year(the WHO actually counts one death every six seconds).
Another statistic claims that smoking cigarette shortens a life by 11 minutes (a statistic that I find bordering on purely speculative because it cannot really be trusted without proof of divine insight). Who makes this stuff up?! By that calculation a man who smokes 20 cigarettes a day reduces his lifespan by 5 days each month, or two months each year.
Yet medics claim that the lungs start to recover minutes after someone stops smoking and that the lung can recover completely with 2 years of first giving up. Ask a 80 year old smoker what he would do with two more years to live. If he hasn't given it up by then, he'd probably use the two extra years to smoke some more.
Not to belittle the WHO statistic, I think the information about deaths related to “tobacco use and exposure to tobacco smoke” also indirectly advocates that people caught in a room with a bunch of smokers ought to light up themselves because they are going to die anyway just by the exposure (talk about literally paying for the sins of the father! A bit too biblical, isn't it?)
Couple that with the fact that some studies indicate that second hand smoke is WORSE than smoking itself and you have a scenario that advocates smoking to save from suffering the greater risk from exposure.
In my view most smokers continue to be such even when confronted by the detriments of the vice solely because they can't help themselves... and because it feels soooooooo good. In other words they are weak and are shallow – far removed from the tough and contemplative image that they had hoped to project.
There are some battles you can't win in the end (after all no one gets out of this life alive) – giving up smoking might be a start.
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