It isn’t so easy to give things up.
We all have addictive tendencies to a greater or lesser extent and we all have a threshold for risk. For those of us who have a high tendency towards addiction and a low risk threshold, it’s possible to become trapped in the repeating circles of your own life. But is this always a bad thing?
We can get addicted to various types of input. Some addictions are sensory – the smell, taste and physical effects of substances from chocolate to alcohol or from chillies to sugar. Some are emotional: power, influence, praise, appreciation, fame. Some addictions can be spiritual, some can be psychological…all of them call for an element of control or we come to carry burdens that eventuallly begin to carry us.
My first encounter with addiction involved a very deliberate attempt to replace one compulsion with another. I can remember the night the decision was made. It was the 2nd January 1984 and I was driving my old blue Ford Escort north over Wandsworth Bridge in London on a cold and crystal clear night at about 1.00 am. The limbic brain looks after both memories and emotions so this was clearly a memorable and emotional moment in my life and one which might explain why I’m still around to write this blog.
The decision I made shortly beyond the witching hour on that deep and crisp and even winter’s night was to finally quit smoking. It wasn’t the first time I had made this decision. In fact you might say that this particular decision-making was becoming something of a habit in it’s own right. All previous efforts to expunge an authority challenge that had become an affectation that had become a habit that had become an addiction had failed, often within 24 hours. This time, I determined, was going to be different and so it proved to be. I can’t tell you that I never touched a cigarette again because that would not be true but I can tell you that any inclination to smoke is now far behind me and lies far away in the mists of the land of Never to Return.
How did I finally do it? Well, I made a Faustian pact with myself. I made a contract and I actually wrote it down when I got home (although not in blood). Without having any evidence that my long and heavy limbed body was suited to such a commitment, I decided that January 2nd 1984 (after a good night’s sleep) would be the first day of my new life as a runner. In my projection of reality, runners didn’t smoke and so to be a runner I would have to stop – and stop I did.
But let’s not forget, I am an addictive person. Pretty soon, I had passed the adoptive phase – those horrific lung-tortured staggerings around Putney Common, each episode more Prometheus than Pegasus. Before long I had bought myself some decent shoes and some matching kit; running nutrients were an interesting topic and I stopped eating meat and drinking alcohol. Runner’s World became my weekly read and the Runner’s Repair Manual (Weisenfeld and Burr, St. Martin’s Press, 1981) my bedside bible. Within a year I had a running diary and I recorded the distances of the 6 or 7 runs I did every week and how I felt. I kept weekly totals, set monthly targets and held parties to celebrate annual goals. 10km races followed and then half marathons and somewhere along the way my good habit became my addiction and my addiction became my burden. Again.
I still run every week. Maybe three times a week on a good week, never less than once. I have learned how to control without giving up the discipline which I know is a good one (my knees might tell you a different story but I read research only today from Gretchen Reynolds of the New York Times that exercise slows mental decline). I liked to think that this was the dawning of wisdom, the final recognition that I was not to be an olympian and so there was really no need to try and live my life like Usain Bolt. I thought, perhaps, that I had travelled beyond the age of addiction.
And then I tried to retire. I will write more about this when I have a better perspective on this new incarnation but the story in brief: 21 years of school leadership in 4 different and wonderful schools in 3 different countries had come to feel like ENOUGH. I decided to quit the habit and knowing that my personality requires a barter at such seminal moments, I signed the pact – if we stop this, we will do….and I told myself that this was a sensible transition and I told myself that I shouldn’t try to go cold turkey as I have seen others fail to do. The result: I haven’t actually stopped working at all and the only thing that I have successfully cut down on is my income.
Another victim addict story? There is one thing that I have failed to mention. I love running. It makes me happy. It makes me feel free. Each run is a communion with my neighbourhood, with my body and with my thoughts. All sorts of things happen when you run. Ideas flow; perspectives change; the heart rate quickens and then calms. Each return through the front gate is the return of a conqueror. I’m back. I did it. I can still do it. I’m going to do it again.
I’ve run in forests and I’ve run on beaches. I’ve run in countries all over the world. Running taught me that people in the Netherlands don’t pull their curtains and running taught me that my body and my brain are parts of a single entity. Running on Vancouver Island was pretty much what I think running in heaven will be like and running up those hills in Hong Kong was something of an opposite experience. I’ve run in Tuscany and I’ve run in Tahoe. I’ve run on a frosty morning in Sydney and in a heatwave in Spain.
Not all addictions are bad for you. I love working too.
