Recovery

Lots of back-and-forth thinking this past month. That's about how long it's been since my last chemo treatment. I keep wondering what's ahead now. That's what causes anxiety, I suppose. It also makes for a certain level of healthy excitement. Not knowing what the future brings can be exhilarating, if not fearful.

I tend to embrace the unknown. Makes it easier to accept mortality and the pains and suffering of so long a life-- "slings and arrows of outrageous fortune," as Hamlet would have it. Joys are much more fleeting. Taking comfort in enduring pain is more lasting. Yes, comfort in pain. You grow intimate with it more so than with happiness and joy.

The starkness and indifference life has to offer is a strange realization. You deal with it with no sense of bitterness or anger. You just deal with it. How do we justify getting angry over what we can't control? Life throws all kinds of obstacles in the way of personal progress. Again, you just deal with it.

Fighting, surviving, trial and tribulation, suffering, pain, agony, despair, disorientation, fatigue, strife, blood, sweat, tears-- all sound so aggressive and almost meaningless. After a while you can only laugh at the worst that life puts before you, and finally have to ignore or side-step all the muck. Maybe recovery is something like that-- knowing how to get passed and leave behind so much that's bad, and move on.

Sure, there are always reminders. Physical pain is hard to ignore. It takes a whole lot of courage, a whole lot of knowing how to muster that courage, to move forward. Fearless, I'm not. Likewise, fearful, I'm not. I just go with the flow, tumble and stumble around the rocks, and make a way for myself. No small amount of courage.