In Search of Effortlessness

or A Smokers Dream Come True

Some may see this as laziness. Effortlessness is the story of Sisyphus without the strain, struggle, and sacrifice pushing the rock up the mountain. One way to explain this is by using habit theory. There are plenty of articles and books about habits. We are a labyrinth and a tapestry of traditions. Some research suggests habits effectively remove our will and willpower from the equation. We know willpower is insufficient over the long run to accomplish goals. How long does your willpower last every day?

Start breaking every habit into four parts. There is the cue, what sets it off, triggers, or initiates the pattern. Initially, I thought of a habit as the routine, good, bad, or otherwise, that runs until it stops. The routine, the pattern only stops at a payoff, the reward. Without a reward, the routine requires constant willpower to initiate. When the reward produces addiction, the circuit is complete. Addiction resets and establishes the cue or trigger to begin again. 

How long does it take to create a habit, good or bad? It appears to be somewhere between 18 and 254 days. The sweet spot is 59 to 70 days. I suggest a week to infinity makes as much sense. Addiction seems essential, real or imagined.

I have willed myself to do something daily for two months or longer. Flossing my teeth is a perfect example. Willpower is at its peak in the morning. Skip a day, and suddenly weeks go by before I need to willpower the habit into play again. I have not found an acceptable reward and associated addiction to keep flossing running effortlessly. Exercising willpower and making it stronger is sufficient for the reward, perhaps. When reward, addiction, trigger, and routine run automatically, effortlessness can be a wonderful state or a crazed nightmare.

At age nineteen, I began dating a woman who smoked. It was summer, and the first few dates were simple. After an extended kissing session, the taste of stale cigarettes was disgusting. A friend told me he had the same problem when he met his future wife. If I smoked a cigarette first, the distaste would disappear. I bought a pack of Larks, they were on sale, and it made me dizzy after one inhalation. I managed a couple more over the evening and had one the next day before going on a date. It worked! The revenge of unintended consequences began.   

By age thirty-one, I was a three-pack-a-day smoker. I could still run a mile in four and a half minutes, but all my friends, everyone I spent time with, were all smokers. Every time I quit cold turkey, someone in my environment paid for a year’s supply of cigarettes if I went back to smoking. Sea Rations cost a dollar a carton, and you could buy fifteen cartons at a time. I was not easy to be with as a smoker who didn’t smoke. By late 1983, I was tired of the struggle. I had studied myself and my addiction. I knew exactly what I wanted. Numerous times what I wanted appeared out of a concerted analysis of exactly what I wanted, along with a willingness to pay the cost for having it happen. A study in willpower or something else?

I wanted to be a nonsmoker. I wanted to quit smoking without pain, struggle, effort, or suffering by me or anyone else who knew me. I wanted those who knew me as a smoker to suddenly not remember I had ever smoked or at least ignore who I had been for who I was as a nonsmoker. I wanted it to be permanent and complete, and I wanted it to happen in an instant.

On 21 February 1984, I had a powerful, profound insight, a breakthrough realization that I didn’t smoke cigarettes; cigarettes smoked me, used me for some purpose unrelated to anything I wanted or was committed to myself. I heard a ‘voice’ I had always considered me, saying, ‘Time to light up a cigarette now, Michael.’ I was shocked to my toes. I was angrier than I had ever been. SOMETHING was using me!!! Every fiber of my being declared “NO!!” for the first, last, and single time. I emptied everything related to the ‘habit’ into the trash. I should have sold the solid gold Colibri lighter, but I was done. I became a nonsmoker instantly, effortlessly. Then a second more useful insight, nonsmokers don’t think about smoking. I haven’t since.

The most amazing thing was all the extra time I had. Nonsmokers do not think about cigarettes and avoid those who do. I had many beliefs about smoking that controlled my way of being. The more ‘beliefs’ you can set aside, not disbelieve, but take out of the equation, the more likely you can see something you have not seen before. Imagine a crystal bowl of spaghetti cooked to a perfect al dente. If each noodle is a belief, a thought, taking one out at a time doesn’t make much difference initially until suddenly there are only a few remaining. However, a clear crystal bowl fills back up with new stuff unless you maintain it empty. Effortlessness requires clear crystal bowls. Effortlessly maintaining a clean, clear crystal bowl is a way of being, a space of possibility, a clearing.     

I am averse to struggle or suffering. Pain is a given if you push yourself toward anything, and failure is the best learning tool ever invented. Fear, struggle, and suffering are all optional products once you see them for the thoughts they are. Every problem we have is from our thinking, our acquired beliefs. The problem, once identified to its most complete and simplest components, is then a solution solved if you are willing to pay the price. The price is a breakthrough you cannot return from, a new sense of space and freedom; effortlessness, for me, is an exquisite addiction.

“My propositions are elucidatory in this way: he who understands me finally recognizes them as senseless, when he has climbed out through them, on them, over them. (He must so to speak throw away the ladder, after he has climbed up on it.) Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.” - Ludwig Wittgenstein

Effortlessness is climbing the mountain with the same ease as walking down the mountain. All there is is climbing a mountain without a top, full of joy and exhilaration.

Going with the flow. Imagine beginning each day at the source of the flow. Clear, clean, cool, and all possibilities.

Life after a ‘breakthrough.’ Does a caterpillar know they are a future butterfly? Does the butterfly remember the caterpillar?

Discover the ‘self’ not as thoughts, the body, history, or story.