Gregor Hens: Nicotine

…
The first few drags after a period of abstinence induced head spin and dry mouth, while a drowsy numbness crept over my extremities. Soon enough this narcotics phase was succeeded by excitation: spit balled in my mouth, my palms itched, my heartbeat accelerated—in my own small and unsophisticated way, staring at the algal scurf on the duck pond, I believed I could achieve something.


And as I say goodbye, I am once again surprised to have come across existences that I never thought possible and that to the best of my ability could never have imagined. And i reckon that Jay Perry, MS, is thinking practically the same thing.


That I have left behind this phase of my life, hopefully for good, I owe primarily to my reading of Moshe Feldnkrais’s The Elusive Obvious, which I quoted from for the epigraph of this book. The merit o Feldenkrais is his bringing to our attention that for every learned behaviour, even the voluntary ones, there are alternatives, and that we simply need to learn them to gain our freedom.