This is not a cancer story.
Maybe it has cancer as a backdrop or cancer as a magnifying glass. But it’s not about cancer.
(Well, if it’s not about cancer, why do you keep saying it?)
Great question!
Let me see if I can answer that without saying *whisper font* cancer again.
If you are lucky enough to get to grow on this planet into a stage called “middle-aged”, you have, hopefully, learned a thing or two about life. And if you have had enough experiences in life on your way to middle-aged, you know for sure that life is hard. Wicked hard. Unpredictably hard. Knock the wind and your feet out from under you hard.
And it doesn’t get easier.
See, now you’d be happy to go back to talking about cancer.
It doesn’t get easier at all, at least that’s what I’ve learned so far.
So, in the face of nothing getting easier, there are two paths to choose, you suffer or you get stronger.
My goodness, the road to suffering is so easy to walk down. Of course it is. When you get your feet and your breath knocked out all at once, it hurts. I mean, it HURTS! It’s painful and palpable, so much so that it’s all you can really see. And if pain is all you can see, it’s all you can focus on, there is nothing but suffering.
Let me demonstrate. Take your hands and move them up to your eyes so they touch your nose. (I promise it’s worth it). Now, just go about your life, but don’t move your hands. I’ll wait. Do all the things you love—look into the eyes of your loved one, pick up that yummy, squishy baby, make your favorite meal and enjoy it over a glass of wine on your porch, see the National Parks, sing in the choir, pet a dog.
Oh wait, you can’t do any of those things. That’s right. Your hands are in a position that makes all of those things impossible. What if you just take your hands and move them to where they belong? Hang them at your side and wiggle your fingers a bit. Your hands are still there right? You didn’t lose them just cause they aren’t right up next to your face, and thankfully, now you can do all the things you love to do-choir, babies, dogs, food, mountains, all of it.
Now imagine that your hands represent the pain we carry in life. All the pain—physical, mental, emotional, past trauma, future fear, every pain. So often, we stack our pain right up next to us cause it’s so big that we don’t know what else to do. And then we can’t focus on anything else. When we can’t do anything else, our meaning in our life slips away and our pain begins to give birth to even more pain. The pain becomes so heavy that we suffer, sometimes greatly.
But! If we take the pain and move it away from the focus, we can take back the meaningful things we want to do. We can enjoy. We can experience. We can live meaningfully.
When you move your hands away from your face, your hands don’t disappear at all. The pain is still present. Pain is always present. As long as we are in this version of the world, we will experience pain. Yes, that’s right, more good news.
But we don’t have to succumb to pain.
So, it’s really not a cancer story at all.
It’s a resilience story, a living life with purpose story…and the journey of how to find that even, and especially, when you are surrounded by pain.
(P.S. If this sounds like toxic positivity, let me tell you why it is not)
