Cancerversary

On this day two years ago, I heard the words “…lymphoma in your gallbladder.”

I stared out of the grubby hospital window into an abandoned courtyard, and thought, “Just like that, my life has changed for ever.” I knew immediately that lymphoma is another word for c-a-n-c-e-r, and the shock was disembodying. I think I floated around, dazed, near my own head for a minute or so, and didn’t really come thumping down into the experience until I heard the word oncologist. Then it was real. Coldly real, sickening, and applying to me.

It came completely out of left field. For all my intuition, I did not spot this coming, most of all not at this time. Whereas a typical cancer diagnosis comes after a person presents to the medical system seeking answers or for routine screening, this hit me completely unawares. Yes, I was bitter and deeply unhappy and had been for some time, but I held no awareness of the way this dysfunctional energy had coalesced in my body. I was less surprised when the breast diagnosis finally came, weeks later, as I’d had suspicions nearly two years earlier - but had been repeatedly reassured I was too young for either breast cancer or a useful mammogram.

Ironically my youth and fertility disguised the blatant lump of post-menopausal woman’s disease, while leading directly to the discovery of the occult lymphoma. And only then circuitously back to the breast cancer, which was again disregarded, even in the face of a known cancer diagnosis. It took one of the most highly radioactive scans to identify what my fingers and intuition had been saying all along: something’s not right. All is not well in my world.

I have never desired an intimate knowledge of the medical system, and yet my life path was suddenly paved with drab linoleum and lined with a succession of sharp instruments. The detour has been psychic as well as physical, and I’m not yet done with making meaning out of it, either. Maybe I never will. Maybe it doesn’t matter, beyond really grasping that the NOW is all that we ever have.

But the detour has changed me. Obviously some of these changes are physical, like the numb heaviness of muscle and implant where there was once a soft breast, and the strange itchy vacancy where the muscle was taken from my back. Some of them are mental, like the moments when my processing memory drops out and I can’t understand what was just said to me. And some of them are nothing less than sacred, like the exquisite weight and blessing of sitting with a friend on the day she died of a disease that I survived.

What does one do with all of this, the unasked-for foray into a land that my contemporaries have no ken of? The last of my youthful expectation of a long life yawning rosily in front of me has been stripped away, along with my fertility, my sharp memory and my eyesight. I am now biologically aged well ahead of my years. But I hope that, along with being so much older now than I was two years ago, my wisdom has grown in equal measure.

I hope the experience informs my compassion for the invisible stories and strength of people who walk among us, changed by their own unexpected detours. I hope it feeds that still place of presence and kindness towards my own self. I hope it makes me greedy for the joy of a life well lived, moment by moment. And I hope it spills out into the world in unexpected and delightful ways, transformed by the sharing of it.

I read a book

This weekend, I read a book.  A whole book.  In a day, actually.

It’s been a very long time since I squandered (or invested) an entire day on reading.  I did surface for food, sunshine, and eye contact, but mostly I read steadily and greedily until I was done.

How good does that feel?  Better than inhaling a whole tub of frappacino-laced-with-scorched-almonds-and-toffee-sauce ice cream, that’s for sure.

So what held my attention so grippingly?  It was a memoir, of all things.  Lessons in letting go: Confessions of a hoarder  by Corinne Grant.  Engaging, excruciating and insightful all at once, I was captured immediately and didn’t want to stop reading until she had grasped her redemption (or in this case, let go of it utterly). 

What fascinated me the most was that throughout this period when she was privately debilitated by psychological barriers as tall as the wall of boxes in her lounge room, she was still functioning and making a career for herself as a performer “out there” under the steely gaze of the public.  And yet the whole time her self-image, brittle in its outdatedness, was stretched thin under the weight of her inflated sense of guilt, responsibility and remorse, held tightly in place by the glue of unexpressed grief. 

To my mind, this illustrates just how marvellously effective our false masks can be.  People generally are happy to accept these masks because it is infinitely more comfortable than being confronted with the messier truth: that we too may not be functioning/coping as well as we project to the world.

But before all of that, before I could even begin to clear out my life, I had to figure out where it all started.  Irrespective of how it may look to an outsider, hoarders don’t just pop out of the ground fully formed.  Hoarding isn’t something anyone is aware of until it’s too late. Hoarding sneaks up on you in the middle of the night wearing glasses and a false moustache and weasels its way in when you’re not looking.

Before the stuff went, I was going to have to get to the truth of the matter. And the truth of the matter is this:  hoarding doesn’t start with the stuff. It starts with something else.

And that something else is much, much harder to get rid of.

Very interesting, and ultimately inspiring read.  Highly recommended for anyone (not mentioning any names) who has a hard-to-shift stuff-stash in their spare room. 

Which reminds me...

With all this speculation going on, it reminds me:

I should probably read the rest of those Harry Potter books sometime soon.  Although I do believe I may have already guessed the ending.  Not because I know very much about the plot development (having only waded into The Prisoner of Azkaban recently), but because the story has mythical overtones  and scope, and there really is only one suitably epic ending that could satisfy the creator.  Surely…?

Speaking of...

Speaking of JK Rowling, I don’t believe it for a minute.

I don’t believe that she hasn’t written anything since The Tales of Beedle the Bard was published in 2008. 

She has commented a number of times that any future works would be published under a pseudonym.  In her interview with Oprah last year she mentioned that she will keep writing because she “..literally can’t stop.” Can't stop?  Will use nom de plume?  It begs another, very obvious question:

Has JK Rowling, slipped one out under our very noses?  Is she sitting in her tastefully understated country mansion, grinning like a lunatic at her audacity at having published under another name, without the media catching a sniff of it?  Or is she three-quarters through something?  I think it’s about 80% likely, given her tenacity, her extraordinary storytelling sense, her creative drive. 

You heard the speculation here, first, ladies and gentlemen.

Which leads me to wonder which of the debut offerings on the Bloomsbury catalogue might possibly have a touch of the JK about them?  Any guesses? (I was momentarily excited by this pseudonymous offering, but Ivy appears to have a very good friend called Elizabeth, so probably not).

The burning bush (reprise)

Whenever you seem to be receiving an unexpected jolt from the Universe, make every effort to note precisely what it was that you were thinking at the moment you took in the message. ~ Wayne Dyer

When the tree caught fire – heralding, quite possibly, a life shift of biblical proportions – I was fully entranced in one of my favourite documentaries, JK Rowling, a year in the life.  What fascinates me most about this short film is the inner process that leads a person to cross the threshold from an entirely unremarkable (and often unsuccessful or even painful) life into something bigger, something they have felt called to all along, the life that makes their whole being sing so that the world rises up to resonate with them in ways they could never fathom until it happened.

Carolyn Myss calls it crossing the drawbridge, my shaman-teacher-man calls it doing the Nike thing (“just do it”), and my sister and I refer to it as flicking The Switch.  Whatever it is, it’s a process of dropping all the excuses, seeing through the illusory barriers, and just getting on with the thing that’s burning inside. Like committing to such a monumental creative undertaking as writing a book – or in JK’s case, an entire seven-part series.

When my panicked neighbour knocked on the front door to alert me to my flaming conifer, I was engrossed in the bit where JK – Joanne - returns to the flat where she lived when she finally committed to follow her inner urging, no matter how dire her circumstances, to write the story that was burning inside her.  She had no way of knowing, as she wrote longhand in whatever time she could snatch while her baby Jessica slept, the abundance that was unfolding magnificently with every page.  In Joanne’s words, “…I turned my life around, completely.  My life changed so much in this flat.  I feel I really became myself here.”

She was completely unaware that this process would turn her life upside down and inside out, in ways she was unable to imagine. That she would return nearly 10 years later with a film crew and find a set of her published novels sitting on the shelf of the news tenant’s bedroom.  All she knew was the urge that burned inside of her, her indeniable yearning, and the commitment to follow it, no matter what the outcome.

This is what I was thinking about when I received my unexpected jolt from the Universe.  Very burning bush, don’t you think?  Could the Universe speak any clearer?

The burning bush

I’d best say upfront: I believe in Signs.  Not signs (except the ones that say STOP / Hammertime!), but Signs.  The wisdom the Universe is whispering brazenly in our everyday lives, for the benefit of the attentive.  So when the sage old conifer in our front yard erupted into flames, I took notice of it.

Once the fire brigade had left, I found myself contemplating the story of Moses and the burning bush.  His bush burned without being consumed.  Ours burned spectacularly then smouldered out of its own accord - and I’m pretty sure it was the powerlines that set it off and not a flaming angel - but there are nonetheless parallels from the Bible story worth plumbing for meaning and insight in my own life. 

So, here’s Spirited’s potted version of the burning bush story.  First off, God tells Moses to show respect for the sacred ground he is standing on and listen up.  Then God gives him some pretty complicated instructions and tells him to get up off his butt and go do what he is meant to be doing.  Step up Moses, get over your insecurities and just do it.  It turns out Moses has a big destiny waiting for him – leadership and a radical life change far beyond anything he can envision.  But Moses dithers…he isn’t good enough for the job, surely?  His fear obscures the power of the path before him.  He just needs to show up and step off, filled with pure intent and determination to follow the voice of the Holy, and he is assured of both abundance and assistance along the way.  Easy peasy.


Moses taking off his sandals by Nick in exsilio

Ok, so maybe that’s the cut down and contemporised version.  My sincerest apologies go to any readers with Judeo-Christian beliefs for any religious nuances that I’m missing.  But, despite my interpretive shortcomings, the story is full of advice worth considering. 

How is Spirit speaking to me through this attention-getting event?  What wisdom can I find in the way it spoke so powerfully to me of the Moses story?  What is the message of my own burning bush? 

Stop and pay attention to the Sacred at work in my life.  Don’t put off things that I know need to be done.  Change my life by changing my actions.  Step up.  Get off my butt, get over my insecurities, and just do it.  Do not delay.  I’m sure there’s more in it about intent, discernment and abundance too, but this is what stood out to me.  For now, anyway.            

Thinking is overrated

I have a terrible habit of carefully considering all the potential consequences of an action before taking it.  It kills spontaneity, and sometimes inspiration too.  I need a little more striking while the iron is hot, and a little less looking before I leap.

This habit is an unfortunate by-product of that misguided process called thinking.  We tend to laud its value in our rationally-driven society, but it is the antithesis of that other powerful sense, our intuition, the keening of our own inner certainty.

Don’t get me wrong, being clever can be an infinitely satisfying endeavour, thinking and thinking your way across vast tracts of intellectual landscape.  But here’s the rub: it doesn’t necessarily advance you at all in real terms.  Not beyond regular functioning, anyway.

Spirited! treatment of Close up of the The Thinker by Marttj

I am entitled to comment on this because I used to be smart.  Academically bright, as well as argue-you-into-a-corner clever.  My former intellectual prowess has now been blunted by a medicinal encounter with a mustard-gas derivative.  Nowadays, my thinking goes around and around without reaching any conclusion, rather like Nemo’s kind hearted friend, Dory, swimming in circles.  When thought comes before action, this is problematic, because the thought process is aborted before the action kicks in.  Nothing gets done.

Decision-making is no longer effortless.  When I do manage to string enough worthwhile thought together to warrant speaking about it, it falters in translation.  I find myself hovering midsentence around a word with a similar phonetic value to the thing I intended to say.  I stutter and umm until I either land belatedly on the intended concept, or abandon it and skip optimistically to the end of the sentence. (Who needs that word, anyway?).  I sometimes resort to charades, waiting for my audience guess my meaning while I say something obtuse like, “you know, that thing you put the water in…” (accompanied by watering-can gestures).  Yes I know how stupid that looks and sounds.  

And in case you’re reading this, congratulating yourself on your own continued mental agility, think again.  You too could find your mind enfeebled, given the right circumstances.  If you’re the one in 8 people who is going to have cancer, the chemotherapy will do it.  It’s a fact which medical science was quite happy to ignore until the breast cancer posse compared notes over coffee, then complained long and hard.  An accident that results in brain injury will do it.  Stress or trauma – and that includes major surgery – will do it as well (something about the hypothalamic-pituitary axis and cortisol levels.  Google it if you don’t believe me).  If you’re female, get ready for this kind of mental fogginess to besiege you during menopause.  There is a secret legion of highly intelligent, successful women out there who are covering up their cognitive shortfalls with exquisitely fine-tuned organisational systems.  Like sticky notes, lists and egg-timers.  Who do you think they invented the blackberry for, anyway?

Luckily for all of us, it turns out our brains are…(what was that word?) …plastic?  …elastic?  …fantastic?  In the bad old days, once a brain cell died it was gone for good.  Or so they thought.  Now the clever people have thunk up a new theory called neuroplasticity.  Basically it means that your brain can change in both structure and function as a result of your experiences.  There is hope for Dory, and for me, after all.

I can eat rainbow-coloured vegetables and fish (sorry, Dory).  I can flood my brain with oxygen through exercise and other deep breathing.  I can meditate in various ways to grow different types of neural connections (hopefully the serene, insightful, compassionate parts).  I can get all the sleep I need and learn to let go of stress.  I can stretch my function by learning a language, or dancing, or puzzles, or taking a class. 

This means I tend to rub shoulders with the olds at the public library a little more than your average 30-something, but they’re an interesting bunch, with histories and insights all of their own. There’s a certain power that comes from having been around longer than everyone else, which the arrogance of youth typically overlooks.  It turns out my brain may be in good company.  As Susan Maushart points out in her thought-provoking book, The winter of our disconnect, older people may be somewhat slower at acquiring new information, but their brains are much better connected across hemispheres, so their “…ability to process, organise and contextualise that information is unparalleled.”  So there may be hope for me yet.

Until then, thinking is still overrated.