[2020-10-18] Sweet and bitter
The cloudy day beckoned me to curl up under a warm duvet with a book. I chose The Pocket Pema Chödrön, which a friend sent to me early in my cancer journey. Pema Chödrön is a Buddhist nun based in Cape Breton, Nova Scotia. I had started her book when I received it, but finished it only this afternoon.
Three key concepts have emerged for me:
- Life is both sweet and bitter, glorious and wretched.
- No matter the circumstances, we can learn from what's happening right now in our lives.
- The difficult moments in life can soften us, make us kinder and help us to better support others.
Here are my favourite passages:
We think that if we just meditated enough or jogged or ate perfect food, everything would be perfect…. Doing this is setting ourselves up for failure, because sooner or later, we're going to have an experience we can't control: our house is going to burn down, someone we love is going to die, we're going to find out we have cancer, or somebody's going to spill tomato juice all over our white suit.
The essence of life is that it's challenging. Sometimes it is sweet, and sometimes it is bitter…. To live fully is to be always in no-man's-land, to experience each moment as completely new and fresh.
When something hurts in life, we don't usually think of it as our path or as the source of wisdom. In fact, we think that the reason we're on the path is to get rid of this painful feeling. And this way we naively cultivate a subtle aggression against ourselves.
However, the fact is that anyone who has used the moments, days, and years of his or her life to become wiser, kinder, and more at home in the world has learned from what's happening right now. We can aspire to be kind right in the moment, to relax and open our heart and mind to what is in front of us right in the moment. Now is the time. If there's any possibility for enlightenment. It's right now, not at some future time.
We can let the circumstances of our lives harden us so that we become increasingly resentful and afraid, or we can let them soften us and make us kinder and more open to what scares us. We always have this choice.
Life is glorious, but life is also wretched. It is both. Appreciating the gloriousness inspires us, encourages us, cheers us up, gives us a bigger perspective, energizes us. We feel connected. But if that's all that's happening, we get arrogant and start to look down on others, and there is a sense of making ourselves a big deal and being really serious about it, wanting it to be like that forever. The gloriousness becomes tinged by craving and addiction.
On the other hand, wretchedness—life's painful aspect—softens us up considerably. Knowing pain is a very important ingredient of being there for another person. When you are feeling a lot of grief, you can look right into somebody's eyes because you feel you haven't got anything to lose—you're just there. The wretchedness humbles us and softens us, but if we were only wretched, we would all just go down the tubes. We'd be so depressed, discouraged, and hopeless that we wouldn't have enough energy to eat an apple. Gloriousness and wretchedness need each other. One inspires us, the other softens us. They go together.
It's easy to lull ourselves into thinking that life is meant to be happy and perfect—that good stuff is the rule and bad stuff, the exception. Intellectually, we know that's not true, but when we're faced with a challenge, it's so easy to fall into thinking that life is unfair. I have avoided doing that since my diagnosis; it wouldn't help me to ask "why me?" Instead, I've tried to focus on what's next in my journey to heal myself.
When I first met with Dr. Faught and he was describing my treatment plan—surgery followed by 6 rounds of chemotherapy every 3 weeks—I could have focused on the end point. "Just get to February," I might have thought. But doing so would have meant missing the opportunity to appreciate and grow from each stage in the process. To experience the wonderful moment of love when I married my husband under an umbrella in the pouring rain with only the officiant and our kids in attendance. To spend time with family members who rallied around me. To recognize how much I am loved by so many people who reached out to me. To know the care of nurses, who are angels in our midst. To learn how strong I am, how positive I am, and how at peace I am.
Most importantly, my struggle with cancer has softened me. I don't know how to describe it. I just feel calmer, kinder and more appreciative of others and their challenges. I try to reflect that softness in these blog posts, to inspire those facing challenges very different from mine and to one day soothe the aching soul of someone who will learn that they, too, have cancer.
