Non Smoking Zone

Sometimes it just hits me.  How insanely fortunate I am.  Food, shelter, love, companionship, satisfying pursuits, sanity, health, (just noticed I put food first.  Typical).  There's a dull patina of guilt associated with the above list.  What did I ever do to deserve them?  Must come from a past life as I've certainly not led an unselfish, unsullied life this time around.  Nevertheless, there they are.  Blessing beyond measure. 

Since quitting smoking 2 1/2 years ago, even my breath has been the source of a healthy dose of gratitude.  When I think of it, breathing, I have to take a deep chest full with unbearably gratifying breath.  How good is that?  I could be dead (no breath), hooked up to a respirator or suffering from asthma or emphysema or some such thing where breathing is an ongoing fight.  Instead, despite over 40 years of smoking, I've been given a second chance and boy, don't I know it!  When I am mindful (read - when I am here and not lost in some storytelling popcorn eating haze of daydreaming) I gulp big lungfuls of air just for sheer delight.  It's so delicious.  Perhaps people who have never abused themselves with cigarettes can't understand but when you smoke your lungs lose elasticity.  You can't take a deep breath.  Impossible.  You inhale so far and it's as though you've hit a wall.  Here and no further so there is no satisfying stretch, like stretching cramped too-long-sitting-muscles.  It is quite awful.  I used to almost get there by opening my mouth and trying to stretch using chest muscles in a poor and ultimately frustrating facsimile.  Now I don't have to.  Sure, there's a long way to go.  Forty years of smoking damage isn't undone in two but the difference even now is profound.

And I feel so sorry for the people I know who smoke.  Can't help them, can't even say anything because I know what it's like when you smoke.  You're addicted and mentally turn off anything that damages the fragile reasons you've made to give yourself permission to smoke.  I did it so well, so thoroughly for so long.  Nothing anyone could have said would have made me change my mind.  So they smoke and they cough and they smell and they have to budget for their smokes as it's unbelievably expensive now and I am sorry.

I am free and oh, isn't that breath SWEET?