Changes

Sometimes you just know when it’s time to do something about your life. Sometimes you have to read the signs.

I quit smoking 14 years ago. Last year, for reasons that are still completely inexplicable to me, I started again. I hadn’t missed smoking, in fact it was, after only 5 years being a quitter, as if I had never smoked at all. I didn’t crave cigarettes, didn’t like the way they smelled, didn’t miss the psychological “oral” pleasure they had given me before. My whole life changed to exclude cigarettes, and then, suddenly, I had to include them again. I didn’t even own an ashtray.
It made me angry that it was so easy to become just as addicted to tobacco as I had been before, but that didn’t make me stop. Neither did the threat of cancer, which I had 3 years ago and survived; the knowledge that I would be even more susceptible to the nasty effects of cigarettes didn’t scare me away. I started up again as if I had never stopped, and before I knew it, I was caught in tobacco’s web.

Until this weekend. Just as inexplicably, I knew it was time to quit. And I did. I feel no ill effects from the withdrawal, I don’t miss them, and I’m not even eating more…I just “knew” it was time to put them away, and so I have, again.

What drives these urges, anyway? What cycles force our desires like this? I just don’t know. I’m not willing right now to explore the deeper meanings of these events—I’m glad I am a non-smoker again, and that I can wake up without lighting up, and drive my car, or talk on the phone without the urge, also. It feels liberating. It feels normal. Smoking didn’t feel that way—and yet I did it for a year. Whatever psychic or subconscious machinations that are deep within my brain or soul will stay there, and stay there undisturbed. I’m back to my “real” self as a non-smoker, and relieved I am able to be so.

As if to mark the occasion of this mental shift, last weekend I ran into not one, but three old friends, and connections I had thought to be severed were renewed. The first was a person who told me my last communication had been “cryptic to the point of bitter.” It wasn’t true—not at all—but it startled me that it had seemed that way to him; I wondered how many others had seen it that way as well. The second meeting was joyous—a woman friend I had lost contact with and occasionally wondered about. I was thrilled to see she was happy, healthy and had the children she'd always wanted. The third was the most startling; an old flame, with whom my dealings had been incredibly intense, and which had been both the most satisfying relationship I’d ever had and, at the same time, the most frustrating. That one just threw me into a tailspin.

All summer long I've been seeing signs and portents and messengers in the form of eagles and hawks. They seemed to follow me wherever I went, on every road trip, at every turn. I kept my psychic ears and eyes open for the message they presaged, but until this weekend, I did not have a clue as to what it was. Now I know something is coming at last; something I won’t be able to ignore. There are definite changes in the air—the Wheel is beginning to turn again, and I can almost hear the gears creaking, feel the wind of its movement whistling in my hair. I’m not worried, I’m excited. I’m no longer stuck at the end of Summer, no longer sitting still while life washes over me…Change is palpable.

And today, for the first time in months, I saw the hawks again. This time I think I'm ready.