A Cigarette, a Thought, and the Loop in Between

Sometimes, something as small as lighting a cigarette out of habit can open a trapdoor in thought. I found myself lighting one before stepping outside, and suddenly remembered I had decided not to do that anymore—because the smoke lingers in the stairwell. That moment spiraled. It wasn’t just memory—it was memory of having reflected, of having once decided otherwise. A thinking about previous thinking.

That’s where this began: the mind folding back on itself. Descartes meets Deleuze in the stairwell. The Cogito, stripped of abstraction, replays through muscle and memory. Habit, I realized, isn’t just repetition—it’s a hole in memory. A bypass. And when it breaks, something floods in: not just the past act, but the past decision, the past reflection. And now, a new chance to act again—but differently. Deleuze called it “repetition with a difference.”

This little cycle is where philosophy breathes. Where the Cartesian “I think” trembles before Deleuze’s return of the virtual: memory not as stored data, but as a virtual presence layered into the now. The flip/switch happens when the real contacts the remembered—and suddenly, you're free again. That space, fragile and flickering, is where I want to look next.

At stake is more than a passing habit—it’s how thought returns, how memory doesn’t just recall but reanimates a prior decision, and how a moment repeats with new weight. The essay will follow (still a draft) how Descartes' clarity of self meets Deleuze’s layered echoes of the past, showing how even the smallest slip can reveal the machinery of reflection, the loops of choice, and the quiet possibility of doing it differently. Now, is always an empty moment with a potential for all things possible.