My smoking brain wants to water the plants

By Julia Harwardt

Translated by Colin Rae

On World No Tobacco Day 2022, it will be exactly 514 days since I gave up smoking. I’m really happy about this, especially after countless failed attempts to quit. I was a smoker for many years, stopping every once in a while only to start again – and with varying, but usually high, degrees of shame and guilt. So I know all too well how hard it can be to kick this (I apologise for using the somewhat judgmental word) “vice”, and I’m the last person to wag my finger reproachfully and point out the harm smoking causes to smokers, those around them, and the environment. Every smoker already knows, trust me.

Alongside all the health and financial benefits of giving up smoking, I feel there’s one aspect that usually gets a bit neglected by all the help and information sources, both online and off. I’m talking about the notion that smoking can boost your creativity and help you relax. I know from my own experience, and from conversations with others who smoke or have smoked, that this can have a major impact on whether someone does or doesn’t stop.

 

Working as a translator can be stressful. In addition to having to understand what are often incredibly complex topics, we then have to render them correctly, concisely, engagingly, and readably in the target language. Then give us the customary tight deadline and watch as our blood pressure rises. Personally, when it comes to focused, mentally taxing work, I’m at best a middle‑distance runner. If I want to produce writing worth reading, I have to air out my “smoking brain” at regular intervals.

I used to consider taking a cigarette break a good way of killing two birds with one stone – relaxing while also boosting my creativity – and for a long time I talked myself into believing that this was working amazingly well. It really wasn’t. At the end of the day, smoking cost me more time than it gave me inspiration. But I admitted this to myself only after I’d stopped smoking. Until then, I had simply been more interested in perpetuating my self-image as a creative, contemplative, and reflective soul, roguishly not conforming to this health-crazed society. No doubt a holdover from my youth, when I had this glorified idea of myself as some kind of rebel whose only way to feel complete was with a cigarette (hand-rolled of course) in her hand. Smoking is also surprisingly time‑consuming, especially in winter. Each time you want to go out onto the balcony, you must first get yourself kitted out in shoes, scarf, coat, and hat, plus roll your cigarette. This is also something that became clear to me only after I stopped.

 

In the meantime, I’ve found lots of other ways to relax and come up with creative solutions for my translations. After a lengthy break, sport and other forms of exercise are now once again a fixed part of my week. As hard as it might be to believe, I actually found that moving my body is an excellent counterpoint to sitting at my PC day after day. Since I worked from home even before the pandemic, I have the luxury of being able to give my brain a rest by performing somewhat mundane tasks. Personally, I find doing the dishes or watering the plants helpful, and the same goes for taking out the rubbish or hanging up a load of washing. These activities require entirely different motor skills and thought processes, so much so that my brain effectively restarts. And sometimes – and without my being aware – it comes up with a new take on a translation problem that I’d been tearing my hair out over. I’ll often then abandon whatever I’m doing and rush over to my desk to scribble down this brainwave or type the answer to an awkwardly worded phrase that has shot into my head, seemingly out of nowhere.

So it turns out that the classic IT maxim of “turning it off and on again” works just as well for grey matter as it does for your PC. It’s better for your lungs and wallet, too!