[2021-01-11] Fearlessness and hope

One of my friends sends me a quote in response to every blog post. I was scrolling through them today and stopped on this one from John Lennon:

There are two basic motivating forces: fear and love.
When we are afraid, we pull back from life.
When we are in love, we open to all that life has to offer with passion, excitement, and acceptance.
We need to learn to love ourselves first, in all our glory and our imperfections.
If we cannot love ourselves, we cannot fully open to our ability to love others or our potential to create.
Evolution and all hopes for a better world rest in the fearlessness and open-hearted vision of people who embrace life.

I related to the second line: "When we are afraid, we pull back from life." I felt like that on Friday and Saturday, after my oncology appointment. I wrote to a friend:

What scares me the most is the thought of a premature departure from this world and the impact that that would have on my family. If I were 80, I could say, "I've had a good life." I can't say that at 54, after having worked so hard for so long.

That fear led me to pull back for a few days. Not completely, of course. I still wrote my posts and cooked food and did dishes and went for walks and engaged with my family and others. But I felt a little deflated and joyless.

Today, I feel like the third line: "When we are in love, we open to all that life has to offer with passion, excitement, and acceptance." This is who I am the vast majority of time: loving, passionate, giving.

The final line—"Evolution and all hopes for a better world rest in the fearlessness and open-hearted vision of people who embrace life."—reminded me of my Wishes for 2021, embodied in three words: healthy, altruistic, fearless. Under fearless, I wrote: "Drawing attention to ovarian cancer and presenting a hopeful picture of one person's journey to overcome it is not something that I need to doubt. It is to be pursued with earnest passion." How quickly we forget our own words.

I want to embrace life. I want to be fearless and open-hearted. I want to contribute to a better world.

My friend responded to my email with this:

I am not in your shoes but offer this—we don’t have to surrender hope Jen even if it waxes and wanes.

I will not surrender hope.