I gave up smoking thirty years ago, when my son was born.  It was easy.

I tried to give up smoking for the fifteen years before that.  It was impossible.

OK, you might say.  Birth of your son.  Who wouldn’t be ready to give it all for their child?

Except that my daughter had been  born three-and-a-half years before my son, and I wasn’t able to give up smoking then, even though I wanted to.

What changed?  How did it work?

Well, first of all, all of the things I tried when I succeeded were things I had tried when I failed.  As I recall, I used nicotine gum.  And I put a pack of cigarettes out on the mantle of the fireplace so it was crystal clear that I was giving it up, foregoing this vice.

But I think there were two key things, one of them slow and gradual and one of them sudden.

The gradual thing was that my opportunities to smoke were diminishing.  We lived in California then, which had a pretty staunch anti-smoking portfolio.  You couldn’t smoke in bars.  You couldn’t smoke in workplaces, unless you went outside.  So my smoking habit was experiencing habitat destruction.

The sudden thing was that all of a sudden I was ready to quit.  And I don’t know much more about it than that.  Maybe it was the accumulation of the various restrictions.  Maybe it was thinking of my son becoming a smoker. 

Some switch inside me had flipped, and I was ready.

I won’t say that quitting was easy, but it was a no-brainer in a sense because I was determined.  More than that: going back to smoking was unthinkable.

I’ve tried to use this two-part formula for other vice removal — habitat destruction and recognizing when I’m ready.  I’ve had some luck lately with weight loss.

But I’m still puzzling over what happened with smoking… and how I could bottle it.