Resolve to - Week 1/52

 We spend January 1^st walking through our lives, room-by-room, drawing up a list of work to be done, cracks to be patched. Maybe this year, to balance the list, we ought to walk through the rooms of our lives… not looking for flaws, but for potential.

Resolve to... 

Week 1:  Lessons in change

One of the biggest, most difficult and life changing habits that transformed my life was quitting smoking. It was January of 2003 and my original intention was to quit on the day my father died in February.  And while the anchor of my why had a good reason behind it, it would still be another month of smoking before I quit and would I lose my commitment in that time?. 

Just after the New Year I was really feeling the effects of my smoking habit, a bad cough, shortness of breath, and the perpetual upset stomach. That evening I decided I was done, and knew if I did not do something drastic, I would change my mind in morning.

I decided to write a declaration outlining my quit plan for Joel, who was already asleep. I requested that he dispose of my cigarettes so that I did not mindlessly return to it them. The next morning, I woke up refreshed, and feeling better,  forgetting  all about my statement from the night before. Easily, if my cigarettes were available to me, I would have returned to the habit without a moments thought. That shift in my bad habit created the awareness of change and a reason to follow through.  This was the catalyst necessary to break the habit. 

Sure, the days were difficult after that, and the habit of reaching for a cigarette remained for many months. There were constant triggers after 25 plus years of smoking, but each day that I  remembered my why was another day I was a non smoker.

Disrupting the habit was the first step.