It worked. I showered and shampooed in the changing room, as if I had gone swimming. So the day has been working better. Why do we have to keep learning the same lesson over and over again? You'd think by my age I'd know enough to behave myself.
St. Augustine said "We do not leave our sins; our sins leave us." I guess. So when you finally resist temptation, it's not because you have developed the strength to resist, it's because the temptation doesn't tempt you any more.
I am so grateful for things hat don't tempt me, as well as for things that have ceased to tempt me. I have never been tempted by cheesecake so it's very easy to resist. I haven't had pie for years; it seems to have fallen off my goodies list. (Actually, a neighbour gave me a piece of pumpkin pie a few weeks ago and I ate it because I don't like to throw things out, but I wasn't thrilled, didn't want to go out and buy a pie.) The trick with resisting the temptation of most things is to say NO once in the store. Once a goody is in the house it starts calling your name.
You notice these temptations are all edible ones. I guess behavioural ones are harder to resist, and more insidious, like porn, I suppose. Well, for me, porn is even less alluring than cheesecake. Come to that, are women generally tempted by porn? Soft porn, I guess - the love scenes that go on for three or four pages, quite explicitly, in Harlequin Romances and their ilk. I actually went through a phase of gulping them, a few years after my husband died. I picked up an HR in a place I was staying at, read it quickly, and cried. My life wasn't like that, nor likely to be, ever. For about a year I read three or four HRs a week, finding some authors I enjoyed - the rare ones with a sense of humour - and analyzed romance fiction. It's harder to write than you'd think.
How did I get to this? Oh, temptation. Oscar Wilde said, "I can resist anything except temptation". Me too.