Today I called my friend Bridget and we chatted for awhile about the road I am about to travel. This is what she emailed me:
So . . . something struck me about your description of your reconstructive phase, the aching soreness that will accompany the muscle stretching action. While there is no pain involved with having active, malignant cancer, it is the healing that will hurt in the way I imagine the cancer should. It is the journey back that is going to have the somatic markers of injury and illness, completely topsy turvy. There is just so much about living that we assume is absolute and it ain't necessarily so.I love that. It's so true. There is so much about living that we assume is absolute and it ain't necessarily so. Who would have thought there would be so much joy in being diagnosed with cancer? Do not get me wrong here. I's certainly not been joyful all the time... far from it... but there has been huge dollops of the good stuff interspersed between the periods of aching poignancy, active fear, pervasive high octane anxiety, and feelings of total overload. Sweeping tsumamis of gratitude for my friends and family. Intense noticings of the details of life: the hummingbird flitting about today, tasting the nasturtia on the hillside; the visceral pleasure of putting on biking gloves; the feel of a hot shower; the pure and simple joy of a good long stretch. I am usually too busy to stop and really relish these things. I'm even relishing the busyness itself, and grateful for its way of taking over my mind with things that don't matter in the long run. I LOVE things that don't matter in the long run these days.
Couple that with this feeling of absolute vibrancy and aliveness I've been having in my apparently very sick body. Knowing that very soon it will be cut, and changed, and will have to heal back, I'm acutely aware of how good I feel in the present moment. I grieve for what is going to happen and fear the healing process. And... at the same time... I look back on my last surgery for a sudden and severe bowel obstruction, and count it one of the most life affirming and important watershed times of my life. They kept me seriously doped upon dilaudid, my friends came around, and it was all so very very different than I would have thought it would be.
So what am I afraid of here? We all know, on some level at least, that things ain't necessarily as we think they will be. Some things will be better than our expectations, some things worse. What we do know for sure is that, nearly always, our expectations are completely inaccurate.
The pain can be managed or gotten through. There will be good moments and bad. Even if the very worst happens on April 14th, what happens next is guaranteed to be nothing like I'd expect.
The unknown will be known in its own time.
We set up our expectations, I guess, to feel like we're in control. Our fear is that our expectations will not equal reality. Which is funny, when you think about it, because our expectations are almost always dire, grim, and fraught with foreboding.
Which ends us up with this equation:
1) The thing we may most be afraid of is that we are not in control, so we create expectations as a way to convince ourselves we're smart enough to know the future, and thus be in control.
2) However, things as they play out in reality are almost always different than we expect, both in good ways and bad.
3) This freaks us out.
4) If we can accept the fact that we are not in control of everything (which we certainly understand intellectually, but mightily resist viscerally), maybe we can reduce our fear, limit our expectations, live into the mystery of each moment, and hopefully enjoy the ride a bit more.
We can maybe get through the bad parts, we can enjoy the good parts, and we can stop a lot of the madness and agitation along the way.
Thank you, Bridget. Good stuff.
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