Windchimes

Warming Up

I should feel free to write whatever in this journal, at least until someone starts reading it . Still, I almost deleted that sentence, just in case anyone ever does.

Was sitting out on the front porch earlier, smoking. Since I'm the last cigarette addict in the house, they've relegated me to the porch or the shed out back. Sometimes, when I'm smoking out there, my husband joins me to take a few puffs from a cigar. He came out with me earlier, and made a comment I thought was kind of interesting, about how you can see yourself exhaling when you smoke. I spent a few minutes reflecting on how smoking makes you so much more aware that you're breathing. An involuntary, automatic muscle action. Normally, you do it without thinking. You have to concentrate in order to not do it for any amount of time, and you can only not do it for so long before you're body violently makes you start again, or else you pass out, in which case you start again also.

You wash dishes, write, read, fold clothes, walk hither and yon and never think about needing to inhale or exhale. When you light up and take that first drag, you breathe more purposefully than normal. You feel yourself inhale, the air has a different taste (ok, so it's an acquired taste) and you feel and watch as you expel a breath.

All of this brings me round to wonder why or if a connection exists between these observations and the inevitable smoking urges that come on when I try to write, or when I try to analyze anything. I never go through as many cigarettes as fast as I go through them when writing a paper for school. I've half-jokingly said the neurons in my gray matter stop connecting without regular nicotine fixes. How-sum-ever, I wonder if, at least in part, the heightened awareness of breathing heightens my concentration on other things. If I'm not trying to capture ideas as I inhale, expel the fluff when I exhale...oh, this is all a load of b.s. Probably.

It sure doesn't help when I'm stuck taking an essay test somewhere and can't get out for a nicotine fix. Any essay test I've ever taken will testify to that. My responses always get weaker and weaker as more minutes get between my last cigarette and finishing to get out of there and have the next one.

I think I've explored those observations enough for the moment. I'm going out to the front porch.


J.H. Larrew
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