What if I had just let go?

What if I had let go when the pneumonia was filling up my lungs and cancer took up residence in my body.  I was in pain.  My body was begging me to say good-bye.  The months before this had been full of hospital stays, mouth sores, crutches, and chemotherapy.

One nurse, perhaps in trying to make me feel better, I can only hope that was what she was going for,  said, "You will live with this for the rest of your life.  It will never go away."  My left foot, the cancer foot, does not work the same way as my right foot.  It doesn't bend as far, it doesn't have full feeling in it.  Shoes are always fun to look for.  But damn it, right, I get to wear shoes on both feet.  I kept my leg, I didn't have to amputate.  It was a long road.  But even twenty years later, that foot is doing some funky stuff and I had to go for an MRI recently, the first one in a really long time.

Maybe that's why I keep thinking of that room where I almost died.  Sometimes, and don't call the paramedics, I think it might have been better if I had.  I want to be clear, I want to live.  It's just that sometimes life gets so very hard and the simplest things like my messy house, long commute, noisy office and way too much work become mountains before me, mountains that I can't scale.  Or even get near enough to lay at their feet in hopeful prayer.

And then the cancer survivor inside of me says, I beat fucking cancer, why am I worried about the small stuff.  Here's the little bit of information all those self help books don't tell you, and I have read a lot of them.  The small stuff is where we live.  We sweat it.  We sweat it a lot.  It's learning how to manage it that makes the difference, we can't just turn it off.  But we can choose how to navigate the worm holes ahead.

I'm still learning, and I keep coming back for more.  More life.  I've let things spiral downwards, so low that I felt like I was that patient in that room and the pain was whispering sweetly, you can let go.  But I never will.  I know that, despite the lows, the loves and passions in my life are what keep me here.

This morning the sunrise was glorious, the sky was streaked in pink and orange swirls and the jagged silhouette of the mountains rose up to meet them.  The light blazed over and around, the mountains glittered against the hundreds of headlights of tired commuters heading their way.

The little things can also carry us through, if even for a brief moment, and sometimes that is all we need. I had respite from the swirling thoughts criss-crossing my brain.  For a brief moment the mountain was my friend and I let myself go in it's beauty.

Sandra XXOO