Chapter Eight: The Quiet Days

This chapter is practical. The chapters before it taught the practice, and the practice does not change here. A feeling comes, you find it in the body, you let it be there, and it passes. What changes is the setting. The feeling now comes at the sink and in the car and on the walk between the office and the station. It comes without warning and it comes when you are tired. So this chapter is about the setting. It is about what to do with your hands, and your lunch hour, and the moment the hand moves towards the pocket. You sit across a kitchen table from a friend who has been through it. They turn their cup by the handle as you talk. The light is going outside. You ask what they did after a meal, when everyone else stayed at the table and they wanted to get up. Read it before you need it, and then again on a day when you do.

The first days

The day you chose comes round like any other, and it is the first thing you think of. There may be a pull before your feet are on the floor, and there may be nothing yet at all. Get up either way. If the device is still in the house it goes now, the whole kit of it, out with the rubbish and not into a drawer, because a drawer is a shorter walk than the shop. Then let the day be as ordinary as it likes, and mostly it is, with some hard hours in it. The slack middle of the afternoon is a common one. The first evening is often the longest stretch, when the day loses its shape and the old moments come one after another, after the meal, at the back door, in the chair with the television on. Give the evening a shape of its own. A walk while it is still light, a bath, an early night. If sleep is thin and you are awake at three with the pull loud in the chest, then lying in the dark is where the practice is done tonight. Find it, let it be there, and it eases the way it does by day, and the morning comes anyway.

The physical withdrawal from nicotine varies. For some people the first days are manageable; for others they are hard. You may feel restless, foggy or short with people, and sleep may be broken. You put the bread in the toaster and forget to press the lever. You answer someone more sharply than you mean to, then stand with the butter knife in your hand while they look at you.

Treat these days as you would a mild cold. Rest more than usual. Drink water. Eat properly and at the usual times. Ask little of yourself. Put nothing big in the diary if you can help it, and if you cannot help it, go and do the big thing with the cold still on you and be kind to yourself about how it goes. And above all, do not fight. The restlessness and the fog are the body finding its own level again, and it wobbles before it steadies. Allow whatever comes, in the way you have learned, and let it pass.

The fog is worth a word of its own, because it frightens people. You reach for a name and it is not there. You stand in a room and cannot remember what you came in for. This is the mind running on its own for the first time in years, without a chemical hand on the throttle. When it has lifted, many find that they think more cleanly than they did before, because nothing now interrupts them forty times a day to ask for a pull.

You will notice that the cravings in these days are frequent but short. They come, they peak, they go. Each time, practise. Find the sensation. Separate it from the story. Allow it. Watch it pass. Nothing is being resisted. Time one, if you like, from the moment you notice it to the moment it is plainly on its way out. Most people are surprised by the number. For most it is two or three minutes and sometimes five, and the story had told you it would be an hour.

And notice that the story grows less convincing with each one. It says you cannot cope, and then you cope. It says you need one to think, and you finish the email without one. You read the email through and find a word missing near the end. Put it in. The attachment is there, the address is right, and you press send. Then you reach for the cup beside the keyboard. The tea has gone cold while you were finding what to say.

And if the story is about anxiety itself, I should feel better by now, treat it with the same care. Find where it sits as you finish getting dressed. Your fingers are on a button and your mind is already at work, in a conversation that has not happened. Fasten the button. There is breakfast to make before you leave. You can sit down to it with the anxious feeling still there, and pour the tea, and hear what the person across the table is saying.

The hands, the breath, the ritual

Much of what you will miss is not the nicotine but the ritual. The reach, the lift, the draw, the pause, the long breath out. It was woven into your days so completely that where it used to be there are holes you can see. The moment after the front door closes behind you. The moment the plate is pushed away. Each of these had a small ceremony attached, and the ceremony is gone, and the moment is still there with a gap in it.

Think about what the ritual gave you, honestly, because it gave you something or you would not have kept it. It gave you a reason to step outside, and two minutes with the phone in your pocket and nobody asking anything. It was a full stop, a way of ending one thing before the next began. And it made you breathe out slowly, which is the oldest way there is of telling the body it can stand down. The nicotine rode along on all of this and took the credit for it. As Chapter Two showed, the hit was relief from the hit. The breath was yours.

Fill the holes with something that honours what the ritual was really for. It was a way of pausing, of stepping out of the day for a moment, of breathing. None of that needs a device. The pause was yours before you ever vaped, and the step outside, and the breath. The vape put itself in the middle of them and charged you money and breath for the privilege. Take them back. Step outside for the sake of stepping outside. Stand on the step and breathe the air for the sake of the air.

So breathe. When a craving comes, or when you find yourself at the edge of one of the old ritual moments, take a slow breath in through the nose, let it fill you. Hold it a moment. Let it out slowly. Then another. Then another. This does much of what the vape did. It gives you a pause and calms the body and marks the turn from one thing to the next, and does it with clean air. If the hold feels wrong, leave it out. The long breath out is the part that does the settling, and you can lengthen it a little each time until the shoulders come down. Nobody watching would know you were doing anything at all, which is one of its virtues. You can do it in a meeting, or at a till, or in the passenger seat.

Give your hands something. Something to hold, or something to do, in the moments the device used to fill. A smooth stone in the pocket. A pen. A mug of tea with both hands round it. The dog's lead, or the car keys turned over and over. What it is matters less than having somewhere for the restlessness to go. The hand learned the reach over thousands of days and it does not forget in one, and it is easier on everyone if the reach finds a stone than if it finds nothing.

Give your mouth something as well. The hand was half of it and the mouth was the other half, and the mouth is the half people forget about until they are standing in the kitchen with nowhere to put it. A sugar-free mint. A boiled sweet that takes a while to go. A straw kept in the coat pocket, cut down to a sensible length. A cocktail stick, or one of the flavoured toothpicks sold for exactly this. Cold water drunk slowly, which does more than it sounds as though it would. These are small things and slightly ridiculous things, and the ridiculousness is worth naming, because the addiction will try to use it on you. It will tell you that a grown man does not stand at the sink with a straw in his mouth. A grown man stood at that sink for years with something far stranger in his mouth and paid a fortune for the privilege.

There are also devices made for this, holding no nicotine and burning nothing, that give the mouth a draw of flavoured air. They are a straw with better manners. Some people find them a real help early on, because they answer the whole shape of the old ceremony at once, the reach and the lift and the draw and the pause. Others find that answering the whole shape is what keeps the shape alive, and that the hand goes on being a hand that reaches. Notice whether your hand settles or keeps going back for another draw. Nothing about them is licensed or tested as a way of stopping, and nobody can tell you what a lifetime of flavoured air does to a lung, so take that question to the counter with the others. And put to yourself the question this book puts to the patch and the lozenge. Is this a bridge, or is it a place to stay? Decide before you begin how you will set it down, and write the answer where you will come across it later.

You will meet that nothing, all the same, and it is worth knowing in advance what it feels like. You fill the kettle and stand there while the water climbs to the boil, and the hand goes to the pocket at the moment it always went, and finds the seam and the lining and nothing else. There is a small blank where the reach used to land. Stand in it. Nothing is in the blank, no nicotine and no danger and nothing to decide. The hand taught itself the move one morning at a time, and it forgets it the same way, and all you do is stand at the counter and let the water boil. Some morning the hand stays where it is, and you notice only afterwards, and you cannot say which morning it stopped.

And be aware of the old ritual moments: after meals, with coffee, on breaks, in the car, before bed, when the phone rings, when you are waiting. These are the times the hand moves by itself. Do not avoid them. Avoiding them would be treating them as dangerous, and that is fear again. Be present in them. Know that the craving may come. Let it. Breathe. Each time you sit through one of these moments without the device, the moment loses a little of its charge, and after enough of them there is no charge left. The old associations are outlived, one cup at a time, and no argument is needed.

There is a wiser kind of avoiding, though, and it is worth telling apart from fear. If one of these moments is too loud in the first days, if an evening in the pub is more than you want to carry yet, stepping round it for a while is allowed. Come back to it when you are steadier. The difference is in what you are saying to yourself. Stepping round for a while says: later, when I have more ground under me. Avoiding for good says: never, because I cannot. The first is sense and the second is fear, and you will know which one you are doing. In these first days you get to choose the order in which you meet them. Over the long run you meet them all, and they are all smaller than they looked.

The ordinary days

After the first days come the ordinary ones, and they have a character of their own. The hard hours grow rarer. What takes their place is smaller and more frequent, and in a way it asks more of you, because there is no drama in it to rise to. Nobody sends you courage for the walk to the car.

The walk to the car at the end of the day is a good example. For years it was the walk to the first pull of the evening, and the body still knows it. Your shoulders drop as the door swings shut behind you, and the hand starts its move before you are down the steps. Let it. Walk the same walk with the same shoulders and the same air on your face, and get in the car, and sit for a moment before you start it. The keys rest in your lap. Someone from the office goes past carrying a bag, and you lift a hand. Through the open window you hear their footsteps going on towards the station. You sit until they have passed, then put the key in the ignition.

Some of these moments are so small you would never have called them moments. Taking the bins out at night. Standing at the end of the drive in the dark with the wheels still settling, a minute that belonged to nobody, and the device came out because it always did. Your hand starts the old reach there. Stand at the end of the drive anyway. Look up. The minute is still yours, and you go back in with your hands in your pockets and nothing in them, and the house is warm.

In these days the story changes its line. It stops saying you cannot cope, because you plainly are coping, and it starts saying that one would not matter. One, after all these days. One as a reward. That is the vape's own voice, and it has only ever had the one thing to sell. Look at the sentence plainly, the way you learned to in the earlier chapters, and let it go by without answering it. The craving under it sits in the chest, or in the jaw, and it is allowed to sit there. And if the one happens, it is one. It is an event on a day, and Chapter Eleven says what to do with it.

What steadies these days is the ordinary floor under them. Eat at the usual times. Thirst at eleven in the morning feels very like a craving, and a glass of water settles one of the two and tells you which. Sleep as well as you can, and do not be alarmed if it is broken for a while. Walk somewhere, even a short way. Chapter Nine has the rest of this. None of it does the stopping for you. It keeps the day from being harder than it needs to be.

The sixty-second wait

The minute you met in Chapter Two is worth having again here, because it has changed. When the hand moves, wait sixty seconds before you do anything else. Count if you like, or watch the second hand, or breathe six long breaths, which comes to about the same. At the end of the minute, do what you want.

Before you stopped, if you used a wait like this, there was something at the end of it. The device, taken after the minute, a little smaller for the delay. Now nothing waits at the end of it, and that changes the wait completely. The minute becomes the whole act. It is a minute of standing in your own life with a feeling in it, and then the minute is over and the feeling has done what feelings do. Often the pull has turned before the minute is up, and it ends with nothing to decide.

The reason it works is the gap. A craving lives on the closeness of the pull to the hand. There was a time when the two were one movement, and you were vaping before you knew you had wanted to. Sixty seconds puts a gap between them, and everything this book has asked of you happens in that gap. The noticing, the finding of the feeling, the allowing, the watching it go. You do not need to do any of that well. You need only the minute, and the minute is there to be had wherever you are.

For yourself

Ask anyone who has vaped what the vape was for, and somewhere in the answer is a break. Two minutes by the back door with the cold on your face. A pause nobody had to grant you and nobody could take. The device is gone and that job is still there, and until something fills it an afternoon can feel like a corridor with no doors in it.

So take the break. Take it without the device and take it fully. Go and stand by the back door anyway, with a mug in your hand and the same cold air. Sit on the wall outside at lunch with the sandwich and the sun and nothing in your other hand, and eat slowly, and watch the people go past. A few crumbs fall onto your coat. You brush them off and fold the empty paper round the crust you leave. Someone comes out with their lunch and sits further along the wall, and you move your bag to give them room.

This is worth taking seriously, because for a long time the device was the only permission you gave yourself. It was the one thing in the day that was for nobody but you. Now that it is gone, the permission has to come from you directly, and many people find that harder than the nicotine. So do one ordinary thing a day that is for you and for nobody else. A meal eaten sitting down, with the phone face down on the table. An early night. A bath with the door shut. Ten minutes in a chair by the window. It does not have to be big and nobody has to earn it first. In the bath you draw your knees up and let the water round your shoulders. The towel hangs over the door. You lie there with your ears just below the water.

There is something larger in this than a break. The addiction ran on a bargain, and the bargain was that you would look after yourself only through the device. It was how you rested and how you got through. Take that job back and the device has nothing left to offer. There was never anything to give up. There was only a middleman, and the middleman has gone.

The triggers

There will be times when the craving is not just a passing sensation but a real pull, and these are usually tied to a feeling. Stress. Loneliness. Boredom. Good news. A hard conversation. An old friend who still vapes. A drink, which Chapter Nine has a word about. You already know your own. Most people can name three without thinking, and it helps to name them before they come and to decide what you will do in each one instead, the way the plan in Chapter Six asked. Deciding now puts the answer where you can reach it later, in the moment itself, when the hand is already moving and thinking is at its slowest.

You know what to do now. When there is a feeling under the pull, and in these moments there usually is, turn towards it instead of the pocket. Ask what is here. Find it in the body. Allow it. Each time you let a feeling be there instead of vaping past it, you learn once more that you can feel a thing and live.

It helps to know what is often underneath. Stress, most often, has fear under it, a tightness in the chest about something that has not happened yet. The old friend with the device stirs envy, or the wish to be who you were at nineteen. Good news finds that joy has nowhere to go if it always went into a pull. None of these needs to be solved. They need only to be found and allowed, in the way you know, and they pass as the craving passes, and often they pass together.

Distraction has its place. If a walk or a phone call or a change of room helps you through a hard minute, take it. You do not have to inspect the feeling first, especially if looking inward makes you more anxious. Choose something that fits what you need: company for a lonely hour, rest when tired, something absorbing when the same worry keeps repeating. The practice can come with you, lightly, while your attention belongs to the world.

Telling someone

Do not do this alone. The addiction grew in private and does badly in company. It was a thing you did with your back half turned, in the step away from the table, in the quick look round before the first pull of the morning. A thing done that way keeps a person slightly hidden, and hidden is where the addiction likes you.

Tell people you have stopped. One sentence, said plainly, and then the conversation moves on. It makes the decision real, and it shuts the private back door through which you could vape and nobody would know. You can say it while you put the plates away. The person beside you asks how it is going, and you tell them about the long evening and the walk you took. They keep drying while you speak. On a hard evening it means there is a name in your phone to message instead of the shop on the corner.

More than that, find someone who has been through this or something like it, and talk to them often. Chapter Ten is about that company. It does not have to be vaping they stopped. Anyone who has put down something hard and stayed off it knows the country you are in.

And when you are further along, be that person for someone else. Answer their message late, on a night that was hard for you too. They are standing outside the shop. Ask whether they want to ring you. Put the book down and turn on the lamp, and when the phone rings, pick it up. You can hear the traffic where they are.

A month on, and a year on

From where you stand now the road can look long. For now you are walking back from the station with your collar up. There is a pull as you pass the shop, and it stays with you across the road. At your door you take the keys out and find the right one by touch.

Each craving is a gift

Try, in these quiet days, to see the craving for what it is, a chance to practise the one thing that sets you free. A feeling has come up and asked to be felt. It is there in the jaw as you stand at the sink, and your hands are in the warm water.

Each time a craving comes and you allow it and it passes, something has happened. An old path is fainter. The plate is still in your hand and you turn it under the tap before setting it on the rack. The cravings arrive on their own, without your having to go and find them, and each one is another go at the practice.

Welcome them, then, as well as you can. Say: here is another chance. Then do the practice. Find it, allow it, watch it go. Then make the tea and get on with the morning. The cravings go on coming for a while, and there is peace in the room when they do.