JRR Tolkien once said – “Shortcuts make long delays” . 

I’m fast approaching my seventh decade on this planet and some of the lessons I have learned have taken many trips around the sun to prise into my thick skull.

Sometimes the lessons need time to seep in, not having enough experience to see them for what they were or they just weren’t taught by a teacher I wanted to listen to. 

I knew from my late teens/early twenties that smoking was completely moronic and wouldn’t lead anywhere good. But, because I didn’t feel the effects, at least not the deep effects, daily experience made for a poor teacher. I still thought walking around with a cigarette dangling from my mouth was cool, a prop to hide the persistent insecurity of life. I always was good at passing the work to my older self. “I’ll get to a stage in my life where I’ll just know what to do” So it took me another few decades to finally quit the habit – not for the want of trying, but I fell into the same old trap every time – pain gone, motivation to continue gone.

Sometimes lessons are ignored or avoided. I should have stopped drinking years before I did. But, it was my ‘only pleasure’ in life – never as bad as smoking, and all my mates were doing the same thing. And while the cigarettes passed for an insecurity prop, the alcohol became an insecurity hammer…. feel insecure, swallow enough alcohol until those feelings are hammered out of my conscious thinking.

What a plonker! 

The long delay in facing up to the objective reality and finally closing the alcohol tap cost me dearly – lost time, lost energy, lost opportunities… and nothing gained.

Clear perspective is a wonderful thing, I look at the years that have gone by since 2nd January 2013 and I’m always grateful to my younger self for not only turning off the flow, but ripping the faucet from my brain. 

There’s just no substitute for taking the long way round.