Re-cycle

Wednesday, 10th May 2023. Reprise.

It’s quite chilling to hear the cancer specialist say ‘I don’t think we’re going to be able to cure you.’ Said mater-of-factly, not as an answer to a direct question, just how it is.

It changes one’s internal, subconscious register from ‘this might kill me’ to ‘this is probably going to kill me.’ This is no longer a childish esoteric curiosity, I wonder if the mind can play any part in curing these kind of things? into some kind of harsh, real life, this is not a rehearsal. Fluff your lines mate and there’s no prompter in the wings waiting to autocorrect. Get the stage direction wrong and it’s: when the curtain comes down do you want to be cremated or buried? If so, where?

For a long time I’ve been a great believer in Elkhart Tolle’s The Power of Now. If I am a great believer in living in the now, however, why do I feel it is  imperative to get a will sorted out? 

And therein lies the problem with most artefacts of the self-help industry. Usually they are quite general. Which of course — here comes the cynic in me — appeals to the widest possible audience which generates the greatest possibilities of sales. Each of us, though, are individuals with specific contexts and issues. Processing the implications of discovering a partner’s infidelity is harder than failing your driving test, but less of an importance in the stakes of life game than facing a killing cancer growth. But if you’re facing the prospect of the loss of faith in a partner’s bond then that is your problem occupying your thoughts and emotions, brutally, my cancer isn’t. Trying to find the fortitude of forgiveness works for those who know or can find out how to do it, it doesn’t work for those who do not. ‘What I would do if I were you’ is rarely any use, unless it comes with the ‘I’ fully understanding the context and life-approach of the ‘you’. “Advice” has to be not an instruction, rather a gift of understanding. So then why am I writing to you about a life-terminating cancer when I don’t even know who ‘you’ are, let alone not being able to immersively empathise when I do know the ‘you’ of my address? And you probably, hopefully, don’t have cancer.

Despite the uniqueness of the aggregation of each of our contexts, thoughts, emotions, spirits and souls, there are areas of commonality. We are all humans, men or women — glossing the issues of blurred gender — black, white or a rainbow of ethnicities, all both different and yet the same. Each of our emotions are similar between us, even if the way they are implemented differ. If my reflexive analysis within the specifics of acute implications can bleed into some understanding for you of your harder-to-grasp situation, be it a partner’s infidelity, failing a driving test or berating yourself for burning the toast (autocorrected briefly to ‘goat’, good luck with that) this morning then that’s a good thing, right? My work here is done.

The Oncologist’s (from the Greek onkos for ‘mass’ or ‘bulk’) words were ‘I think …’ To express an opinion commencing ‘I think’ is not to know fully, it’s not expressing certainty. There’s an element of doubt. Where there’s doubt there’s wriggle room. A space where, perhaps, my mind can get to work. But if there’s the possibility that the quality of my thinking can make a difference, make the difference, then I have to believe implicitly, whole-heartedly, completely, that there’s a future and I’m going to be alive in it. That thinking isn’t in or about the Now, it’s in the Then. A driving test can be taken again, a partner forgiven (eventually) or a new one found. The carbon-footprint on the surface of the toast scrapped off. I have to believe I’m not going to be toast, after all. After All.