Chapter Eleven: The Open Country

As the weight is set down and the fire burns low, as the quiet days gather one on another, something begins to open. This chapter is about what lies above the plateau, the feelings a person rises into once they are no longer organised around lack.

You may not live here all the time. No one does. But you will visit, and each visit shows you what the addiction was hiding. It was hiding a life much larger than the one you had.

It is worth saying what the open country is, because the name could sound like a place far off, reached after years of effort. It is nearer than that. It is the ordinary world, seen by a person who is no longer reaching. The same street, the same kitchen, the same bus, the same people. Nothing out there has changed. What has changed is that there is no longer a small hungry thing standing between you and it, asking every twenty minutes to be fed. When that thing goes quiet, the world comes forward on its own. You do not have to go and find it.

Most people notice the open country before they can name it. Someone stands at a window with a cup of tea and finds they have been there a while, looking at the rain on the glass, and that nothing in them wanted to be anywhere else. The tea has cooled enough to drink. A drop gathers on the outside of the glass and runs down, taking another with it. Across the road someone comes out to a car with a coat over their head. They get the door open and fold themselves inside, and the rain goes on.

The order below, clarity and then love and then joy, is a description and not a course. Nobody climbs it. You will find yourself in one of these for an hour and then back on the plateau by lunchtime, and that is how it goes for everyone. What rises, rises on its own, once letting go has become the way you meet whatever you feel.

Clarity

The first thing to arrive is clarity. The fog lifts. The nicotine fog goes first, and then the deeper fog of a mind that was always half turned towards its next relief. You find you can think in longer arcs, follow a thought to its end, and sit with a problem without needing to step outside. The edges of the world come back, the leaves on the tree, the words on the page.

Clarity is what the vape pretended to offer. It said, I help you focus. And it did, for a few minutes, by easing the withdrawal it had caused. Real clarity is something else. It is the ordinary state of a mind that is no longer divided against itself. You will know it when it comes. It feels like waking on a morning with nothing wrong.

Take a Saturday market, a month after your day. You are there for vegetables and bread, the way you have been a hundred times. The difference is hard to point at and easy to feel. You hear the man on the fish stall calling his prices, and you hear the whole call, from the first word to the last, and you find it funny. You see the colour of the beetroot with the mud still on it. You count out coins without losing your place. A woman ahead of you takes a long time deciding between two loaves and you stand in the cold with your bag and you are not irritated. You are watching her decide. There is nowhere else you need to be, and there is no bin at the edge of the market that you need to go and stand beside. The old you would have been half here. The old you would have carried the next pull around the stalls, thinking about when. This you has both hands free.

Nothing has been added. Attention that used to be spent watching the clock for the next relief is returned to you, and you spend it on the market instead. The woman chooses a loaf and asks for it to be sliced. You put your bag between your feet while you wait. There is mud on one of the handles where you held it with the beetroot in your hand. You rub it with your thumb, and when the woman turns to leave you move the bag out of her way.

You may also find that you can bear to think about things you used to step outside to avoid. A letter that needs answering. A conversation you have been putting off for a year. The vape was a way of leaving a thought before it was finished, and when the leaving stops, thoughts get finished. This can feel like a great deal at first. There is more in the room than there was. Let there be more in the room.

Use it. Clarity is pleasant, and it is also a tool. With it you can see the patterns in your own behaviour, the places where the old reaching is looking for a new object, the situations that still carry a charge. Look at these with the clear eyes you now have, and let go of what you find.

The old reaching looks for a new object

Of all the things clarity shows you in the first months, this is the most useful. The reaching does not stop when the vape stops. Chapter Five watched it move house, to the phone or the fridge or a drink at six, and the whole of that account is there. What clarity adds is that you now see the move as it happens, the small lurch away from a feeling and towards a relief, and a lurch that has been seen loses most of its hold. Meet it the way you met the craving. Stop, find the feeling beneath the reach, allow it, and then decide about the biscuit with a clear head.

Some situations keep a charge for a long time. The pub garden keeps one, and the end of a hard shift, and a particular friend or a particular car, and the first minute after a row. Clarity lets you see these coming. You need not avoid them forever. Walk into them knowing what they are, with the practice in your pocket, and let the charge run down while you stand there. Each time you do, the place is a little more yours and a little less the vape's.

Love

Beyond clarity there is something the word love points to, though the word is worn smooth with use.

What is meant here is larger than romance and steadier than sentiment, and it does not attach to one person. It is a state, the whole self turned towards life, open, needing nothing from what it meets, on the side of whatever is in front of you with no conditions attached.

Love is what the addiction was starving you of, because addiction is a closed circuit. The self, and its need, and its relief, and its need again. There was no room for anything else. As the circuit opens, love comes in, and it comes from the inside. Nobody hands it to you.

You will notice it first in small ways. A patience with people that you did not use to have, and a tenderness towards your own body as it mends. A gratitude, sudden and unearned, for ordinary things, the morning, a meal, a breath that goes all the way down. It is life itself coming into view, now that the thing standing in front of it has been set down.

Picture an afternoon a month or two on. A child's bike has its chain off and a brake that rubs, and it is on the path outside, upside down on its saddle and handlebars, and you are kneeling beside it with black hands. The child is watching. They are asking questions you cannot answer while you are threading the chain, and you are answering anyway. The light is going. The chain goes on, and comes off, and goes on. There would once have been a point in this where you stood up and said, give me a minute, and walked to the end of the path to breathe on something, and came back with less of yourself. Now there is no minute to go and take. You are kneeling on a cold path with a child and a bike. You turn the pedal with one hand and watch the chain run over the teeth. The child leans closer, and you wait until their fingers are clear before turning it again. The brake still rubs. You spin the wheel slowly to find where it catches, and the child crouches beside you to look.

Love, in the sense this chapter means, is attention with nothing else pulling on it. The vape took a small, steady toll on your attention for years, a few minutes at a time, and the people around you paid part of the bill. They got you back from outside a little colder each time. When the toll stops, what is returned is more than time. It is you, all of you, in the room.

Love also turns towards your own body. The lungs are clearing. Sleep is settling. The taste of food comes back and is a small astonishment each morning. Look at this body with something like fondness. It carried the addiction for years without complaint and it is mending now, on its own, asking nothing from you except that you stop pouring the stuff in. There is a way of resting a hand flat on your own chest, in the dark before sleep, that says thank you without a word. Do that sometimes.

And love, once it has room, wants somewhere to go. You find that you want to be of use, and Chapter Ten said what that looks like and why it holds. Here it is enough to say that this is the last of the old circuit going. The self that needed and was relieved and needed again is now a self with something to spare.

And love has a particular relationship to the cravings, if they still come. Seen with love, a craving is a small frightened thing that wants comfort, and love can hold it the way a hand holds a bird. Let it be held. Let it pass.

The person who vaped

There is one more direction love faces, and it is the hardest. It faces backwards, at the person who vaped.

Chapter Seven made peace with that person, and if the peace is made, this is only a reminder. Many people carry a low opinion of who they were, as a private verdict, and the verdict does harm. It is the shame the addiction ran on, still running. A person who despises who they were is one bad evening from becoming them again, because the addiction's oldest line is that you were never anything else. Love has no verdict. Turn towards that person the way you would turn towards a friend who had been through it. Say to them, I understand why you did it. You are allowed to stop now. Then let them go.

The recovery fellowships found long ago that this is where freedom is made safe. A person who has made peace with themselves has nothing left for the addiction to use, and the peace holds better when one other person knows the whole of it, which is why Chapter Ten asked you to be known.

Joy

Beyond love there is joy. Love faces outward, towards the person or the day in front of you. Joy is what that feels like from the inside, when nothing is pulling on you at all.

Joy is not happiness in the sense of things going well. The boiler can be broken and the joy still there. It is the feeling of life enjoying itself through you, of being wholly here with nothing held back and nothing reached for. It comes in moments at first. A walk where the hedges seem lit from inside, or a conversation in which you are all there.

An ordinary day with joy in it looks like this, so that you know what to look for. It is winter, and you have driven to the sea because the house was too small. The car park is empty. The wind comes off the water hard enough to make your eyes run, and the sea is the colour of a slate roof, and there is nothing to see, no boats, no sun, nothing worth a photograph. You walk along the front with your hands in your coat. A dog runs past you with no owner in sight. The cold gets into your ears. And somewhere in the second hundred yards you notice that you are happy, and you cannot say why, and not being able to say why is part of it. Nothing is going well. You are cold and you have a long drive back and the boiler at home is still making the noise. And you are happy, in the plain sense of a person who is here and wants nothing. You stand and look at the grey water for a long time. Then you go and get chips.

The person you were would have had a vape in the car for the drive, and a vape on the front, and a vape before the chips and another after them, and each one of those would have been sold to you as the enjoyment of the day. You carry the chips back towards the car, stopping to eat a few while they are hot. The wind lifts the corner of the paper and you fold it under your thumb. There is salt on your coat. You brush at it with the back of your hand and eat another chip, looking out past the wall at the water.

Days off are not the only place it turns up. Take a weekday. You take your coffee out to the step, because the step is still yours, and you stand there with the cup warming your hands. The coffee tastes of coffee. You finish it and take the cup back to the sink. The walk to the bus is nine minutes and you spend all nine of them walking. At the stop you stand with your hands in your pockets like everyone else and look at the sky, which is doing nothing in particular, and there is a small lift in the chest that you cannot account for. A bus turns the corner and you lean out to see the number, then step back to let it pass.

You may be surprised that a guide about vaping ends up here. Underneath the nicotine, the addiction ran on a belief. The belief was that you were incomplete, that completion was out there somewhere, and that the vape could fetch it. Joy is the direct experience that you were never incomplete. The body knows this before the mind does. And once you have tasted it, even for a moment, the vape has nothing left to offer, because it was only ever a copy of this.

Where joy comes from

It helps to understand why joy turns up now, when it did not turn up before, because otherwise it can look like luck.

The vape offered you relief many times a day, and as Chapter Two showed, each hit eased a discomfort the last one had set up, so the whole day was organised around the next one. You can only feel joy from a self that is not organised around anything. It takes a person who is here, with the hands free and the attention unspent. That person could not exist while the circuit was running. Now it can, and joy is what that person feels when they look at the sea, or the child, or the beetroot with the mud on it. This is why there was never anything to give up. What you gave up was the thing standing between you and this.

Joy does not need to be chased. If you go looking for it, it goes. It arrives sideways, while you are looking at something else. The only thing you can do to make it more likely is the thing you have been doing all along. Let feelings come and go without resisting them. Stay in the present moment, which is the only place joy has ever been found. Smile at the whole business a little, the way you would smile at a dog that has finally stopped barking at its own reflection. Then get on with the day, and see what turns up.

Some people find the word joy too big for what they feel, and call it ease, or lightness, or a good day. Take whichever word fits. Whatever you call it, the thing itself is a morning on which you are not at war with yourself, and you know it when it comes.

If you slip

It is worth saying plainly, here in the open country, what to do if you vape again.

You may. Many people do, once or more, before it takes for good. If it happens, here is what it means. It means you vaped. That is all. You are not back where you started, and you are not weak, and nothing you have learned is lost, and it is no reason to carry on.

The addiction will try to make it mean all of those things, because shame is what it eats. Do not feed it. Do the practice instead. Find the feeling that came up, the shame or the fear or the disappointment, and allow it. Let it be as big as it is. Let it pass. Then look, with clear eyes, at what happened. What was the feeling beneath the reach? What was the story? What is there to learn?

Watch how it goes for one person, so that you can see the shape of it. It is dusk in a hospital car park. She has been inside for three hours with her father, who is not going to get better, and she comes out into the cold and the orange lights, and the car is at the far end, and there is a vape in the glove box that she never threw away. She sits in the driver's seat and she takes it out and she uses it. Four or five pulls. Then she puts it on the passenger seat and looks at it. After all that, she thinks. And this is the moment on which everything turns, because there are two ways to leave this car park.

One way is the addiction's way, and it goes like this. So that's that. All that for nothing. I knew I couldn't. I'll finish this one and then stop again. She drives home vaping, and the device goes back in her pocket and she is telling nobody. The other way goes like this. She sits in the dark and lets the shame come, and it is enormous, and she lets it be enormous, and after a few minutes it is less. She looks at what happened. The feeling under the reach was grief, and fear for her father, and she had nowhere to put either of them at the end of a hospital corridor. That is what the vape was for, she thinks. It was for this. Then she gets out and drops the device in the bin by the ticket machine, and she drives home, and when she gets in she says to the person she trusts, I used it tonight, in the car park, after seeing Dad. And they say, oh love. She still has her coat on. The other person pulls out a chair, and she sits with her hands between her knees and begins to tell them about her father. He asked her to bring his slippers. She had to lean close to hear him.

Notice what she left undone. She leaves the device in the bin. At home she takes off her coat and hangs it by the door. The next morning she wakes up and there is her father to think about, and the slippers to find, and the number of the ward on a piece of paper beside the phone. She rings before she leaves, to ask how he slept.

Then set it down and go on. A slip is a moment. A moment is not an identity. A person who has done this practice is not undone by a single reach. They are reminded why they are doing it. Be kind to yourself, the way you would be kind to a friend who stumbled, and walk on.

Read this before it is needed

The time to read the paragraphs above is now, on a day when nothing is wrong, and not in the car park. A slip in a hard hour does its damage mainly through what the person believes it means, and beliefs are hard to change in the dark with the shame up. So change it now. Decide, on a calm day, what a slip means. It means you vaped. Decide what you will do. Allow the feeling, look at the story, tell one person, go on. Write it down if that helps, in a few lines, somewhere you would find it. Then when the hard hour comes, and one may, you are not deciding anything. You are following a note left for you by someone who could see clearly.

Tell one person. A slip kept secret grows in the dark, because the addiction has always lived on secrecy and a hidden slip is its favourite food. Said out loud to someone safe, it shrinks to its true size, which is small, and the shame has nowhere left to hide.

If it happens more than once, the same applies each time. There is no number of slips after which the practice stops working, because the practice was never about counting. Each slip is an event, and each is met the same way, and each has a feeling under it worth looking at. Some people find that their slips gather around one situation, and once they have seen the situation clearly it stops catching them. Some find that the slips thin out and stop without any single day on which they decided anything. You are looking for a life in which the vape matters less and less, until one day you notice that it has not crossed your mind for a week.

You can make the note more useful with one small adjustment drawn from what happened. In the hospital car park, it might be having someone to ring after a difficult visit, or arranging support before the next one. In another life it may be a different route home, a break taken earlier, or moving the note from a drawer to the pocket where the device used to be. Choose what fits the actual moment, not a punishment to show how seriously you take it.

Include anxiety in the plan if it belongs there. Perhaps the first sign of a difficult week is an evening spent searching, or cancelling a visit you had wanted. The response need not wait for a slip. Put the phone down and ask someone to come round. You can tell them about the visit you cancelled while you fill the kettle. Read the note together at the table and decide who you will ring. Leave it there, beside the phone, while you make the tea.

Letting go of the letting go

One last thing about the open country. There comes a point where the practice itself can be set down.

At first, letting go is work. You remember to do it, you find the feeling, you allow it, you stay. In time it becomes a habit, like locking the door. And after that, if you keep on, it becomes how you are, a person who does not resist their own experience, who lets feelings come and go, who reaches for nothing because nothing is being avoided.

A year on, it looks like this. You are in a queue, or a meeting, or an argument, and something rises in you, irritation or fear or the old restlessness, and you do nothing about it. You do not name it, or find it in the body, or breathe into it. You feel it and it goes. There is no practice any more, because there is no gap between the feeling and the allowing. The two have become one movement, and you have forgotten there was ever another way to be.

At that point, you no longer need to think about vaping at all. Nothing is being held down. It has stopped mattering. It was a solution to a problem you no longer have. You can leave the house with your keys and come back for the bag you forgot, without searching the table for anything else.

Beyond joy, the old descriptions put peace, and it is worth saying what they meant by it, because it can sound like nothing at all. Peace is what is left when there is nothing to reach for and nothing to push away. The feelings still come. Grief still comes, and anger, and fear, and they are felt in full, and they go. What has gone is the struggle with them. Peace does not mean that nothing happens to you. Everything still happens. You are no longer at war with any of it. You will visit it, on a winter beach or a cold path with a bike, and you will know the place when you see it.

This is also the point at which a guide like this one can be closed. It was written to be outgrown. Put it on the shelf. Come back if you want to, on a bad week, or to lend it to someone, or to remember. It will say the same things. But the thing it was pointing at is now in you, and that is where it lives.

That is the real gift. You get up from the path while the child takes the bike by the handlebars. Your knees are cold and there is oil on your fingers. You hold the gate open while the child wheels the bike through, careful to keep the handlebars clear of the post.