HABITS: Can't live with 'em, can't live without 'em.

I used to smoke four to five packs of cigarettes a day. Finished my first pack by 10 a.m., the second by lunch time, another one or two packs by the time I got off work, and one or so packs in the evening before bed. For most of the time that I smoked, I wanted to because I liked it. At some point, I realized that what I was doing was  inexcusably expensive and unhealthy. After that, I smoked because I had to. I was forced, against my will, to light up because if I didn't, all kinds of alarms went off in my body that said life would be intolerable if I didn't smoke. I was caught up in my habit.

In theology, virtue and vice are considered to be habits -- they are dispositions to act in certain way. Temperance, for example, is the ability to exercise restraint: don't go ballistic when you're mad, don't eat till you barf, keep your pants on at parties. Like any habit, a virtue does not consist of a single act. Just because you didn't loose your pants at one party in 2003 doesn't make you virtuous. A virtue is something that develops over time. Like a habit, the more you do it, the more you are likely to do it, and that's good if what you're doing is good. If it's not good, then what you've got is a bad habit, or in theological terms, a vice.

Not all habits are vices and virtues, sometimes they just are. In trying to adjust to life without a real job, I became aware that I was being plagued by a feeling of angst during the course of the day. That can be very natural for the unemployed, but I took notice that I was fine in the morning and only got angsty in the afternoon, around two o'clock or so. That was the time that for the past fifteen years I would take my shower, gird my loins and head off to work. It's still there. After five months, each afternoon my body rallies itself in preparation for the commute and another day on the job.

As part of the spiritual journey afforded me with this time off, I've been confronting my vices. I won't bore you with details, other than to say I've gained a little bit of respect for them, of how visceral they've can be, of how they can flow through your body like tides in the sea.

When I finally quit smoking, I withdrew for three days and slept, getting up only to go to the bathroom. Then I spent two weeks where every waking minute I was aware that at that moment I was quitting cigarettes. Finally, after two weeks, I began to have short periods of time when I actually didn't think about it, and the silence was startling. After about six weeks, there came a day when I realized I had quit. It was like the sensation of getting over the flu, when the coughing and soreness and runny nose are recent enough to remember clearly, but you don't actually feel them anymore.

Fortunately I don't have a lot of vices. I don't know that I have the strength or time left to handle more than a couple.