One dilemma that will soon arise is that there will be more nonsmoking hours than waking hours in one day, that we might need to stay awake for 16 hours or 20 hours or even 48 hours anticipating that first cigarette. This will obviously have adverse effects on our lives and fall under the category of self-abuse, self-torture and self-punishment. It becomes obvious that there is a limit to the amount of time that first cigarette can be postponed in a single day and that is the number of hours we can within normal limits stay awake. If we happen to be ready to sleep before the time limit is up, there is nothing stopping us from smoking before sleeping. There is no point in staying awake an extra hour or two just to smoke a cigarette, it is better to smoke it and go to sleep. Tomorrow is a new day with new challenges. Let’s say we reach 16 hours of non-smoking and are awake 16 hours and we need to add an hour, we can then add an extra hour to the next day so we smoke one hour later than we would normally. In our example above, the person that smokes at 08:00 would not smoke for an entire day and smoke at 09:00 then next day and then abstain for a day and two hours and then two days and three hours. The choice to smoke before sleep is present and we will benefit from trusting the gut feeling and doing the things that causes the least amount of pain.

Having gone an entire day without smoking is an enormous success and we need to celebrate this occasion and mark it on the calendar and commemorate it every year in the future. Having gotten up, lived an entire day, and later gone to sleep without smoking, for the first time (for most smokers) since we started smoking or for as long as we can remember, is truly groundbreaking. We have broken the ground that we used to stand on, the ground that was the smoking habit, it has been shattered and now a new continent can rise where marshes of the smoking habit used to be. On this very day, we have been more non-smokers than smokers. Considering today to be the first day of the rest of our lives, we have then spent most of the rest of our lives as non-smokers. Today marks the turning point where we stop moving towards death from lung cancer on the smoking-addiction-scale and start moving towards non-smoking, towards health. It is a great day to be alive.

Another option would be to be lenient on ourselves and allow ourselves to smoke that cigarette once the amount of time reaches the upper maximum of our daily lives. The ultimate goal here is choice. This is the integration of the fourth dimension with the other three. The fourth dimension is time passing, and the old self being a thing of the past and us becoming our present selves and over time reaching into our future selves. We can’t change our past selves, only our perception of our past selves, we can be all we want to be in the present and we can put effort now into becoming the future self we want to be. Every cigarette we smoke is a small effort put forward into a future self that is a dis-eased smoker and every minute we spend not smoking is an effort put forward into becoming a future self, healthy and free from smoking. Every time we allow guilt to motivate our actions, our future self becomes more guilt prone; every time we allow love to motivate our actions, our future self becomes a more loving self. We need to be aware of our actions today and we need to understand our actions yesterday in order to become who we want to be tomorrow.