I started smoking cigarettes when I was 13 years old, in 1988. At first, I only smoked with my mate Jeffrey who lived a few blocks away from my home in the southern suburbs of Cape Town. Jeff introduced me to illegally imported Marlboro, which at that time in South Africa was not freely available in the stores. Those long red and white cartons were like gold bars to teenagers and Jeff, through family connections, had a treasure trove of them.
At my school smoking was punishable by expulsion. Jeff and I were bored miscreants, and breaking the law made the days a little more exciting. The dalliance with Marlboros quickly grew into a regular thing where I’d sneak out the house and meet Jeff in the green belt, down by the river that flowed between our two houses.
By 21, I was smoking 30 cigarettes a day. On an evening out with my mates, I’d average around 40–60 cigarettes in one night. I would wake up on Saturday mornings with yellow fingers, my digits stained by smoke perpetually twirling up from the cigarette dangling at my waist.
Twenty years later, I’ve long since stopped smoking and embraced a more healthy lifestyle. I went cold turkey on my 25th birthday, and now I cannot understand why anyone would want to inhale toxic tobacco fumes into their body. Mouthing a diesel car exhaust pipe seems healthier to me.
When people ask me why I used to smoke so much, my immediate answer was: ‘rituals’. My day was peppered with so-called rituals. Every time the phone rang, I’d immediately pat my pocket to ensure I had a pack of smokes with me while I blabbed into the receiver. I could not fathom a cup of coffee without lighting up a Gauloises. If I heard the ‘pop’ of a beer being opened, I’d scan the table for my matches and fags. Each morning, I’d start my car, by smoothly lighting up with one hand and turning the ignition with the other.
Only recently I realised these behaviours were not rituals. These were dependencies. I’ve grown to see the difference and it’s less obvious than one might think. Here’s my view:
A ritual is additive: it an intentional, regular occurrence that is intentional — adding focus, consistency and harmony.
A dependency is subtractive: it is unintentional, habitual and energy-sapping — bringing distraction, chaos and disharmony.
Upon reflection, I now see that my life is filled with dependencies.
Each day, I take my two German Shepherds for a walk through my overgrown jungle of a garden.
Sounds like a good thing, right? Actually, nope. Before leaving the house, I ensure I have my iPhone with me, earphones in place, and then proceed to find a nice place to sit in the garden. Usually, I’ll spend around 20 minutes on my phone, checking Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and Quora, while my dogs bound through the long grass. I’m surrounded by life, by nature, by energy and vitality — yet, I choose to spend my precious time in a digital bubble: head down, glued to a tiny screen, scrolling through an infinite digital timeline.
Another example: every morning I roll out of bed, stroll to my kitchen and brew a super tasty blend of African coffee on my stove-top coffee pot. Nice, right? Nope, again. The pot makes four cups of coffee. Guess how many coffees I have, before I’ve even hit the road? Yup, four caffeine-infused, magnesium-depleting doses of the good stuff. By the end of the day, I’ll have sunk between 8 and 9 cups of sweet, milky-brown nectar. I’m fairly sure the Surgeon General wouldn’t approve.
One more: Every single Sunday for the past 10 years, unless there is a tropical cyclone hitting the shores of Cape Town, I cook up a fiery feast on my Weber. Healthy, right? Nuh-uh. Pretty much every time, my feast includes the oiliest, greasiest and richest combination of meats that I can muster. It’s a platter of food-grenades, a culinary battering on my senses. Believe me, I look forward to lighting those coals all weekend — the heat from the flames provide a healing salve over the stresses of everyday living and the resulting meal sating my anxious hunger. It stands to reason, however, that my heart will surely begin to take major strain over time.
These dependencies craftily disguised themselves as rituals to me. Moving forward, I’m conscious that this new-found awareness is an opportunity to make some fundamental changes in my life. From today, I’m trialling a few things, listed below:
- Going for daily walks with my dogs, sans technology.
- Brewing only one, super-tasty, single-shot of coffee in the morning.
- Substituting all those super-tasty double-shots of coffees that I used to have during the day with copious glasses of clean, super-tasty, healthy, abundant H2O.
- Deleting Facebook from my mobile phone (Alas, I still do require it for my work at the digital marketing agency that I run).
- When going out with my mates, only drinking decent beer, decent wine or decent whisky.
- Stretching or exercising in the mornings, instead of spending an hour browsing the mobile web.
- Answering emails twice a day, at noon and before I leave work in the afternoon.
- On Sundays, I’m not stopping firing up my Weber, but I’ll be swapping the greasy beef sausages with lean chicken and fish.*
Today marks the the start of killing my dependencies — those horrible, insidious habits that slowly drop a veil over my eyes and before you know it, you’re doing 30-a-day, or 9-a-day, or a-binge-a-week.
It’s also the start of of building my own personal rituals: conscious activities that enrich and enhance my life.
*Nothing on God’s green Earth will stop me from firing up the Weber on Sundays.
