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. 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 as anti-thought. Where the Cartesian “I think” is thought again, passed through its own entrails and striped of its I and turned into a virtual. 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. Now, is always an empty moment with a potential for all things possible, al things headed to their past in reflection.