Monday is not a real place

It sounds like commitment, which is the clever part. You are going to quit properly on Monday. Clean week ahead, the stressful thing behind you, a plan, maybe a little preparation first. Next to that, one more night of smoking is a rounding error. It almost sounds responsible. And notice what the plan quietly licenses in the meantime, in the hours between now and midnight. Every future date is a permission slip for tonight.

Watch it for a second and you can see the machinery. The date is never the part that gets kept. Monday arrives and it turns out to be a bad week to start, or the morning goes wrong, or something comes up that clearly deserves an exception, and a new date gets issued immediately, because issuing dates is the only thing this system produces. It was never a plan to stop. It is a way of not being here, and here is the only place stopping has ever happened.

Because there has never been a good day for this. Nobody who got free did it on a well chosen morning. They did it in an ordinary minute that looked exactly like this one, mid week, tired, unprepared, with something unresolved going on and no ceremony anywhere in sight. That date was not special beforehand. It became the date because of what they did inside it, which is the only way any date has ever gotten that job.

So this minute is the one that is available, and it is the only one that is. You do not have to feel ready. Ready was never a requirement, it was the excuse wearing better clothes. Get through the next hour, then go to sleep, and let Monday be a Monday. Ask God for tonight only, which is the size of thing a person can actually be given. The day you look back on will not be the one you planned. It will be this one.