the land of uncertainty: terra infirma

in which we learn a thing or three from the vicissitudes of cancer . . .

we are a people who swim to shore.

capsized or plunked in the sea (from the bill of a stork perhaps?), the certitude of shoreline, of solid earth beyond sight line is where we set our scopes. and our stroke. so help us, god of the insubmersible.

we are a people who long to be anchored, a good lot of us anyway. we like to know what we know. terra firma, geologically or otherwise, our grounding of choice.

it’s simpler that way: a world colored in black and white.

until it’s not. until that false lens, that black-and-white-only lens, is lifted from our eyeballs and we see as it is, not as we wish it would be.

we learn, kicking and screaming, to live in uncertainty. to honestly own the fact that we have no clue what tomorrow will bring. let alone the next time the phone rings.

my phone rang. three years ago now. (for those who would have no reason to know, it rang in the form of a cancer, an unusual one, deep in my lung.)

over here, in the land i call home now, in the land of life-after-the-call, certainty is seen for what it is: mirage. uncertainty is the dictum. its lessons, hard-learned. but its lessons, imperative.

and it’s transformative. to not know if or when is to seize the now. the only feasible reality.

to learn to live in uncertainty is to learn not only to aim not to blink so you don’t miss whatever it is that might pass you by, but to figure out how glorious it just might be to lustily grab for all the nooks and crannies of living you might otherwise have brushed to the side. the invitation you might have ignored once upon a time. the last minute chance encounter you might have thought too hard to chase after. the too-many-miles, too-busy-already litany of sensible and rational and utterly logical excuses?

well, they’re more apt to get flung out the window now.

there is little about my constitution that would have had me guessing i’d be one to drop my apron (literally) in the middle of cooking dinner, and dash to the train to be downtown by seven to meet a bevy of souls i’d been longing to know. but it happened the other night. and the day after that, i got a call from an old and glorious friend who wasn’t too far away, and who’d love to catch a quick tea if i had even half an hour to spare. i was sipping chamomile before the cock crowed three.

what happens these days is something like this: first, the old first-responder cogitator leaps off the bench, the one that always, always comes up with a good list of reasons why not budging really is easier, smarter, the choice that makes the most sense. but then this scratchety little voice creeps in, the one that on a bad day might break me out in shivers, but on a good day is the perfectly polite though somewhat pushy prod that i truly do need: dude, remember back when you were scared out of your wits, and you promised you’d carpe the diem? remember how you swore to God you’d not waste even a minute if that last scan came back clean?

well, sweetheart, the minute is now.

time, you’ve found out, is your luxury—not your due. spend it while you have it. it truly is your finest commodity, the one you finally realize is the beginning of everything and anything.

the trick—and this really is the hard part—is to not lose sight of that. to not think that just because so far wednesdays have followed every tuesday you’ve ever known, it’s going to go on that way into forever. or at least your forever.

that’s where any time-ticking predicament—in my case, the cancer that might or might not be aswirl right now in my lung—comes to the rescue.

cancer is the needle stuck in the groove. cancer reminds, again and again, this day is not promised. this hour’s not to be assumed. time is not earned. not a prize you get for being the smartest, the coyest, the wiliest one in the bunch.

it’s the thing every last one of us who’s ever been here on this earth, breathing, kicking, screaming, has gotten from the get-go. what we don’t know is how long we’ve got it. the expiration date is penned in invisible ink.

i spend plenty of time pondering time these days. it’s elusive and ephemeral and all that there is. it seeps into every molecule of my every day. the question of time. the imperative of time.

i consider time from any and every angle. because it makes me not lose sight of it. it makes me seize it. it makes me see the jawdropping magnificence of the way the morning light streaks across the old maple table where i’m typing now. it makes me not plot my day quite as blithely as i once might have done. nowadays i see time as something of a river, and i am learning to float along. to ride the current. let go of the oars. to not mind the eddies and the tidepools where i might idle. to savor every sight along the riverbank. to explore where it dumps me. to bathe in it. to learn that all along the way i am carried. and for as long as i’m afloat, i am taking in the ride.

i like that it jolts me awake. i’m of the kind who needs a jolt now and then.

the other day i stumbled onto a passage from d.h. lawrence, the great british writer who back in the winter of 1929 to 1930, shortly before entering the sanatorium where he would die of tuberculosis at only 44, struck up his pen. he zeroed in on the very sorts of thoughts i tend to be thinking.

holed up that fading winter in a rented bungalow along the french mediterranean coast, lawrence penned what would become his posthumously published final work, apocalypse (1931). it’s his meditation on the book of revelation, a “vigorously iconoclastic work, a radical and searching criticism of the political, religious and social structures” of his time. it’s considered his last testament, his one last gasp to convey for all time his vision of humankind and the cosmos.

what most caught my eye is this, lawrence’s musing on the very wonderment of our improbable existence:

The vast marvel is to be alive… The supreme triumph is to be most vividly, most perfectly alive. Whatever the unborn and the dead may know, they cannot know the beauty, the marvel of being alive in the flesh. The dead may look after the afterwards. But the magnificent here and now of life in the flesh is ours, and ours alone, and ours only for a time. We ought to dance with rapture that we should be alive and in the flesh, and part of the living, incarnate cosmos. I am part of the sun as my eye is part of me. That I am part of the earth my feet know perfectly, and my blood is part of the sea. My soul knows that I am part of the human race, my soul is an organic part of the great human soul… There is nothing of me that is alone and absolute except my mind, and we shall find that the mind has no existence by itself, it is only the glitter of the sun on the surface of the waters.

. . . “the magnificent here and now of life . . . ours only for a time . . . dance with rapture that we should be alive and in the flesh” . . .

so often, it is in the dying that the clarity comes. if only we could learn to see without the penumbra of fear shocking us into the now.

i’m awake now. so very awake now.

this life in the flesh: it’s ours only for a time. with rapture, let us dance.

***

when you’ve found yourself in terra infirma, how have you found your way? or, better yet, how did you learn to come to the dance?

p.s. i am actually starting to wonder if maybe, just maybe, after all these years of blathering away with lower-case liberties, i need to kick off my carefree typographic slippers and remember how to employ that shift key, hoisting us into the realm of the occasional, clarifying capital alphabet letter….i know: radical times….coming soon, perhaps: the Occasional Capital Letter. (feel free to chime in on the matter….)