Smoking: Personal Experience
30 August, 2010
Smoking is regarded by our elders as a great sin religiously, according to the ethos of their sect. So we since childhood have been suckled this doctrine.
However, towards adolescence, signs of mutiny begin to show themselves. Stealthily, as most of the adolescents do, my colleague and I used to buy a cigarette for each when returning home from school. It is interesting here to make a comparison with some other community.
Recently, I was chatting with some Belgians about their smoking experiences. One of them said casually; when he was twelve, his father said to him: now you become a man so you have to start smoking.
That smoking experience did not lasted long for me. I quitted.
Many years after that, at the end of the university stage. One day I was alone in a room in my modest parents' house in our village. A cousin had spent that night with us and left early in the morning. He was about my age. He was smoker.
I found my self alone and suddenly, for unclear reason, anger and frustration overwhelmed me. I looked a round searching for relieve, I noticed a box of cigarettes forgotten by my cousin on a table. I opened it and snatched the only cigarette in the box. I took one breath, an other, a third and I found my situation worsened further. My immediate reaction was to crush what remained of that cigarette on the unfloored ground directly beneath me. I violently blasted my self: what am I doing?. The mere process of drawing smoke into my lungs and puffing it out, for me at that moment, was stupid, foolish and meaningless. I found no consolation from that, but my depression deepened.
From that moment on, I hated smoking, after that, I never experienced any desire to light a cigarette. May be my subconscious ness played a role in that, affected by childhood warning against smoking by our elders. Our Belgian friend said that he quitted smoking before almost a year. I consider my self lucky to go through that event.
Otherwise, if I found that damned cigarette relieving, I might have continued smoking till this moment. I owe so much for that golden moment in my personal history.
Mohammed Elfadl Ibrahim
Terrarah
Alsouky Sudan.
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