Last month I found out that I don’t have prostrate cancer. I’d
been in the state of unknowing for a few months, so it was a huge shift in
perspective - like something leaving that you don’t even remember arriving. A
weird feeling.
I'm sure it is weird for most people who go through that, but for me it has
another edge to it. Because of childhood trauma I'd always found life more scary than death, so when I got told back in early
March that I might have cancer I had mixed feelings: some surprise, and curiosity, but not fear. All my concerns were about what it meant for my wife.
The journey since then has been most odd. At the start of it
I lost what I had thought of as my closest friend. In part through telling her I might
have cancer and her not wanting to be the one I talked to about it. That in turn led me
into a place where I felt I had to keep it a secret from anyone other than my
wife, who I also felt I needed to protect from knowing too much. To cope, or
deal with that, I put it out of my mind and convinced myself that the symptoms
were probably something else (as it turned out to be) and just carried on living with a weird, background feeling that my life might not be as long as I'd previously expected. And since I was kind of okay with
that, I was also avoiding finding out for sure by turning down potentially damaging investigative
procedures and delaying blood tests.
The purpose of this practise/retreat is to ‘find
out who you are’. In my case, I had always been basically just fear, both of life here now and of where we come from (i.e. our source, whatever that may be).
To my great surprise, the retreat (which was very intense) shifted so much of that I found
myself in a state of love with life and - for the first time - with myself. And even more oddly and also for the first time, I felt at peace with my origin.
All this was not just some sort of spiritual
high, it was the removal of a lot of negativity and past pain. I didn't gain anything new in terms of a faith of some sort of god or
something, nothing like that; it was just a letting go of all the ‘old
me’ stuff - like a few years of therapy in one weekend. Which was the point of the retreat.
This was great, obviously, but brought with it a new
challenge: for the first time since I was about 10, I wanted to live - and thus wanted
to not have cancer. I had the curious feeling of suddenly being okay about life, while
also being aware I might be about to lose it. Very bitter sweet. It was like
that feeling we get when we're in a foreign or new place, and see great natural beauty, but
are alone and have no one to share it with. Joy and sadness at the same time. (See what the Postwoman says in the 2006 film, Paris, Je T'aime for a great explanation of this).
I think that's what life is: joy and sadness at the same time. And heck of a lot of it.
And as ever, it left the question: okay, still here, what now?
