I think one reason why so many of Oscar Wilde's little quips are remembered all these years later is that most of them contained more than a grain of truth. He had a way of couching his observations in an amusing fashion, so the reader could laugh even as they recognized themselves in the mirror he was holding up to them. He also had a funny way of cutting right to the crux of an issue, as he did in this case, pointing out the obvious in a clever way.
He's right, of course. It's very easy to resist things...unless of course one is faced with temptation.
Unfortunately for us, we live in the real world, instead of in a magical, parallel dimension where our will is never tested. In this life, we are constantly surrounded by and confronted with temptation. There are entire industries devoted to manufacturing it in ever-more-tempting configurations.
Though I'm sure Oscar would have come up with a much wittier way to say so, I have a feeling he might agree with the sentiment I will now express in my not-so-eloquent and much less quotable way: temptation totally sucks!
You're still learning to navigate the unexpected: a whiff of smoke in the air as you walk by a place where people are puffing away; someone offering you a smoke because they don't know you've quit (or worse, even if they DO know you've quit!); seeing signs, displays, coupons or ads; a smoker's huddle outside a bar or restaurant or your workplace...for a while there, it will seem like reminders of smoking are all over the place, and each and every one is tempting you to bail on that quit. Whispery little voices start intruding on your inner monologue.
Part of our problem is that smokers (addicts of any kind, really) tend to kind of suck at the whole self-denial and impulse-control thing. Don't know about you, but I'm sure guilty as charged! Sure, we might have one or two areas of our lives that we control (our career or school performance, our eating or exercise habits, our relationships with others) and we cling to those, as if they represent proof that we can control something.
Because most of us start smoking early, we often don't develop critical, grown-up coping mechanisms either, instead spending most of our adult lives impulsively (and eventually, compulsively) giving in to an urge to smoke so we can stave off feelings of discomfort, or anxiety, or stress. We self-medicators are not fond of those uncomfortable, unfamiliar feelings and agitated thought patterns; it's one reason why we do what we do. And because we've had so little practice in saying "no" when the impulse strikes (because for a lot of us, cigarettes fixed everything), we are frequently unprepared for facing real-world, post-quit temptations.
One of the things we need to master when quitting (and this is true of those using nicotine replacement therapies or medication as well as Cold Turkey quitters) is learning to say no to temptation. It's not a simple matter of exercising some dormant sense of willpower; it's straight-up behavior modification: learning and mastering a completely different response to an impulse you may experience, and learning to deal with the resulting feelings that go with it.
As smokers, we tend to have a pretty low tolerance for feelings of anxiety or discomfort, and we tend to have one response when we experience them: SMOKE! SMOKE NOW!! NO, NOT LATER, NOW!! FOR THE LOVE OF PETE, WHAT'S THE HOLD-UP?? IT'S TIME TO SMOKE!!! NOW!! RIGHT NOW!!
As you can imagine, this is not a good response for the post-quit impulse to smoke. When you are faced with temptation (and you will be faced with it), it helps if you remind yourself of a few things:
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