Writing Through Cancer

I found myself back on the treadmill this week.  Oh, not the one in the gym, unfortunately.  The other one, the one created by an overbooked life.  Meetings, classes, a bevy of deadlines for syllabi and proposals, social engagements.  It’s only the fifth day of the New Year, and already, I’m running as fast as I can.  Remember last week’s post?  I began with the first line of a poem by Lucille Clifton, “i’m running into a new year…”  At the time I wrote, it was only January 1^st, the day after I’d returned home from a Christmas in Toronto, and I was enjoying the relaxed pace of my day, the return to quiet.

It didn’t last.  By the second, my online calendar was issuing multiple reminders:  go here, remember that, follow-up on this, finish that…  I complained about the sudden rush of activity to my husband.  He shook his head.  “How on earth did you manage to get so busy this month?”  I couldn’t come up with a reasonable answer.  The truth is, I’m often too optimistic about my time, and I find I’ve packed far too much into my days.

In the Middle 

of a life that’s as complicated as everyone else’s,
struggling for balance, juggling time…

One day you look out the window,
green summer, the next, and the leaves have already fallen,
and a grey sky lowers the horizon…

 This past Friday, I was at Moores UCSD Cancer Center with my wonderful writing group of cancer survivors.  I read Clifton’s New Year’s poem as the springboard to our first writing exercise.  K. used the treadmill metaphor to write about her sense of the New Year, capturing more than a few shared sentiments by those of us around the table.  The image that struck me most of was being on a racing treadmill and having it abruptly stop.  Ouch!  Everyone knew the feeling, but it’s not just an unexpected diagnosis, illness or emergency that stops us.  Sudden losses, disasters, Mother Nature’s onslaughts—all can bring our lives to an abrupt standstill.  Then what do we do?

Each day, we must learn
again how to love, between morning’s quick coffee
and evening’s slow return. Steam from a pot of soup rises,
mixing with the yeasty smell of baking bread.

Each day we must learn…there’s more to that phrase than we think.  Filling our lives with busy-ness is a kind of habit, a way of being that sneaks up on us over time.  How do we shift the balance, to move from “running out of time” to being vigilant about how we use our time?  To step off the treadmill suddenly would send us flying, and the landing would be abrupt and hard.  But to slow the speed gradually, take a few deep breaths and pay attention to the world around us, that’s something we all keep re-learning throughout our lives.

In today’s post from Brain Pickings Weekly, a site I inadvertently subscribed to over the holidays, the topic was about how long it takes to form a new habit.  We are what we repeatedly do, Aristotle once proclaimed.  Right.  I repeatedly overbook myself, building internal pressure and, to be honest, stress.  So I am a stress cadet?  Apparently so, if I accept Aristotle’s words.  William James, one of our first psychologists, agreed.  Could the young but realize how soon they will become mere walking bundles of habits, they would give more heed to their conduct while in the plastic state.  Okay, my plasticity is not so great after all these years, but I can change my habit of over-scheduling myself, can’t I?  All I have to do is learn how to say, “No,” right?  I’ll just make this one of my new year’s resolutions.  I’ll start right now…well, in February, since this month is already completely booked.

I’m kidding myself, according to the folks at Brain Pickings Weekly.  They asked how long it takes for a new habit to take root in a person.  According to a study conducted at University College in London, it took 66 days of consistent behavior before a habit  formed, and in cases of well entrenched and complex behaviors like mine, it could take much longer—the better part of a year in fact!

I’ve often written about paying attention, the act of being fully present to our outer and inner worlds.  It is the writer’s work, yet even though I am a writer, the truth is, I get pulled in a dozen different ways just like anyone else.  It’s sometimes difficult to quiet my mind, notice and be attentive to the gifts life offers.  It’s difficult to slow down and pay attention.

Ted Kooser, former poet laureate and a cancer survivor, knows that even a poet can be distracted by life’s demands.  His book, Winter Morning Walks:  One Hundred Postcards to Jim Harrison, created from the postcards written to his friend as he recovered from surgery and treatment.  In his preface Kooser describes how the book came to be:

“In the autumn of 1968, during my recovery from surgery and radiation for cancer, I began taking a two-mile walk each morning…hiking in the isolated country roads near where I live…During the previous summer, depressed by my illness, preoccupied by the routines of my treatment, and feeling miserably sorry for myself, I’d all but given up on reading and writing…  One morning in November, following my walk, I surprised myself by trying my hand at a poem.  Soon I was writing every day… I began pasting my morning poems on postcards and sending them to Jim…”

The poems reveal a touching portrayal of a man recovering from the ravages of illness and treatment, whose spirit and sensibilities were reawakened in a habit of taking those morning walks.  Once again, he began to notice life around him, slowing down to take pleasure in the beauty of the natural world.

…Time is always ahead of us, running down the beach, urging
us on faster, faster, but sometimes we take off our watches,
sometimes we lie in the hammock, caught between the mesh
of rope and the net of stars, suspended, tangled up
in love, running out of time.

(“In the Middle”, by Barbara Crooker, From:Word Press, 1998)

“Time is always ahead of us…”Where has the time gone?  It’s a question I ask myself a lot these days, but perhaps I should ask instead, “What have I done with my time?

What about you?  What are you doing with your time?  Explore the concept of time, how it seems to run ahead of you, how you might squander it, or how, when you realize how fast it runs ahead of you, how you manage to slow down and appreciate the gift of time.

Time wants to show you a different country.  It’s the one
that your life conceals, the one waiting outside
when curtains are drawn, the one Grandmother hinted at
in her crochet design, the one almost found
over at the edge of the music, after the sermon…

Time offers this gift in its millions of ways,
turning the world, moving the air, calling,
every morning, “Here, take it, it’s yours.”

 

(From: “The Gift,” by William Stafford, In: The Way It Is, Graywolf Press, 1999)