Well, folks, it's been nearly 120 days since I last puffed a cigarette. In three days, I will enter my fourth calendar month being smoke free, having quit back in March on the 14th.
According to my quit application, I've saved over $663 US dollars, and I've NOT smoked 2,394 cigarettes thus far.
Those numbers stagger me.
I was paying about $6 a pack, as I recall. On a daily basis, it's not hard to scrape up $6 and not miss it. But if I had been forced to pony up $663 in advance to smoke for the next four months, I would have found that completely unacceptable.
Similarly, 20 cigarettes a day seems like a lot, but not that many. It's just a little over 1 an hour. But if I had calculated that over the next four months, I would smoke nearly two thousand, four hundred cigarettes, I would have found it easy to say no way.
Smoking is a killer in little bites. Just a few smokes every day - what's the problem? Just a few dollars a day - so?
But it adds up - quickly. By my calculations, it looks like I would have spent nearly $2,000 a year to sustain my habit, and I would have puffed 7,200 of the little bastards in that period of time.
After four months, I still get an urge now and then for a cigarette. But it's pretty rare; it's pretty weak, and it's not much of a problem. Best advice I can offer is still the simplest: take it one hour, one day, one week, one month, one year at a time.
And every now and then, take stock at what you haven't spent, and what you haven't smoked, and feel good about yourself. I know I do.
