I sat with this woman once, a client of mine long ago, and she needed some help. She and her children were hungry and a small gift card was all she was asking for. She told me that earlier that day she had to resort to stealing in order to feed her kids.

To some, her story sounds ‘so sad it has to be made up.’ ‘A ploy just to get a handout.’ ‘B.S.’ 

But not all is as it seems.

As she’s talking, her kid starts crying so she takes a container of something like Ensure out of the bottom of this beat up, rickety stroller and hands it to her hungry little one….mind you, just like any parent giving their hungry kid a little snack. “I know I shouldn’t have. But I don’t know what else to do. I don’t take the good stuff from the people who can pay for it, I only take the oldest stuff, the stuff that is marked way down because it’s about to be thrown away.” The rest of her story was tragic – How she came to be in such need. How lonely she felt fighting for her little family. How stuck she was because the system is beyond broken. All while her little one chugged something all-but curdled, not once complaining.

I am so grateful for the people I’ve had the honor to listen to over the years. Each one choosing vulnerability and showing me a glimpse of their upside-down. Each one teaching me a little more perspective. Each one changing me a little more by their stories. I truly believe I am relentlessly authentic because of the incredible, relentlessly authentic people that have shown me the way. I bring this up today to pose a challenge. Alice, in her upside-down, is being told a lot of things about what she is and who she isn’t by the caterpillar so contentious and the pigeon so stubbornly opinionated… 
…Sadly, based on current observations, there are a lot of caterpillars and pigeons. Not all is as it seems and we’d be wise indeed not to assign someone else’s motives or write someone else’s story. Instead of joining the caterpillars and pigeons, be different.

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Except :: May 11, 2018

I had a fine day….Nothing of major consequence to note….

Except I almost started crying on the way home from Costco. And I got super nauseous in the middle of the day randomly. And I sneezed and sent my chest muscles into spasms. And I got another bloody nose. And watching people look at me as they try to determine if I’m sick or just edgy is interesting. And I lifted a case of bottled water and have regretted it since. And I just noted that as of today, I’m two months away from surgery. 

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The Tangibility of the Present :: May 11, 2019

I had breakfast with a group of women today that I simply adore. I wasn’t feeling very well and was in a lot of pain and really wasn’t feeling up to getting up, getting myself put together, driving across town and being social…but man am I glad I pushed through that to invest in relationships that fill my soul. What I love about this group of women is that we are all counselors by trade and so we connect on a level that has such depth. We can sit in the muck with each other, we can cry with each other, we can laugh at the absurdities of life together, we can celebrate the wins of life together, we can talk shop, we can empathize, we can ask good questions and we can offer deep answers.

Today, one of them asked me to give her some examples of how I ‘live changed’ and live so presently. It was an interesting question because I talk a lot about how cancer has taught me to live 5 minutes at a time and how I am so much more present-minded than “BC” (before cancer)….but to actually articulate what it looks like to live 5 minutes at a time is different. Being present-minded, living moment-to-moment is an intentional practice. It means a multitude of forks in the road and choosing which direction to take based on momentary information. It means faith. It means patience. It means holding visions for the future very loosely because the reality is that they probably won’t come to fruition in the way it was originally envisioned, anyway. It means 2 weeks ago, I was not ready to be done with reconstruction but now I’m at peace with not needing surgery again for a long time. It means God is creating for me a “what’s next” but we aren’t there yet so I rest in the “what’s now.” It means I hug my kids extra long. It means intentionality in interactions. It means everything is temporary so feel deeply, invest wisely, accept change and hold loosely.

BC, I lived for the future vision. I strained for what was always out of reach. I stressed over what I wanted to come my way. I behaved in ways that were always focused on where I wished to be. My attitude reflected a discontent with the present because I was so focused on where I was headed. I wasn’t connected to what was happening in the present…the present was simply a thing I had to get through, almost as if it was a nuisance, because the real focus was on what was waaaaaaaay down the road. And then 2017 hit. With all of it’s traumas. With all of the figurative (and literal) semis crashing into my life and derailing any and all vision I had. With all of the opportunities to learn how to live so vastly different. I now live for what I have and know now. What is this 5 minutes showing me? What information is available to me right now that I can use to inform my next 5 minutes. The reality is that I can have a plan for a year from now all I want, but one small piece of information in one minute can change everything… For me, it was getting out of a car that was just totaled by a semi with a crystallizing moment of, “oh my gosh, how am I not dead?!”…. it was a radiologist saying, “well, I’m concerned and we’ll need to do a biopsy” that turned into “your biopsy shows probable cancer” that turned into “you have cancer” that turned into “you have stage 3, grade 3 cancer” that turned into “bilateral mastectomy” that turned into “chemotherapy and radiation” that turned into “provided we get past acute treatment and you survive, then we’ll have 10 years of maintenance to ensure its remission”… Each 5 minutes that came and went had new information that determined a harder road ahead. And all I had in between each piece of new information were those moments in between. 

When the certainty of the next 5 minutes is shattered because literal death can take its place, that’s when the tangibility of the present becomes the only certainty. And that’s when the only thing that matters is the moment.

There is such freedom in living like this. I don’t miss my old way of living. I don’t miss being able to vision the future. I don’t miss the dysfunction of living for later. I trust that I have everything I need in this moment for this moment and I trust that I’ll have what I need for the next moment in the next moment. And 5 years from now, I’ll have what I need for what is happening then without having lost out on the richness of the moments in-between. 

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If Only You’d Known :: May 11, 2020

I have a kid who is 2 finals away from being done with high school. And all I did was blink. A milestone like this offers such a beautiful opportunity to reminisce, to contemplate deeply about life *pre*milestone…to consider all of the growth, through both the setbacks and the successes…to stand in amazement at the changes that, in real time feel molasses-slow but in looking back, they were in that blink of an eye.

As this milestone nears and as we plan ways to honor this amazing kid (somehow amidst this pandemic), we have taken time to look through the pictures that have captured the past almost 18 years. 

…“If only you’d known what was headed your way.”

I don’t really know what to do with that feeling. As pre-diagnosis images came up, our eyes and our smiles drew my attention and with each one, that thought and a twinge of sadness and hurt, awe and hope. Sadness because I had no idea the pain that would rip into our souls. Hurt that my body and our family would be forever marred. Awe for what all we’ve endured and hope that because we can do hard things, we can do hard things. The pictures elicited such deep emotions and while I was nostalgic for the time before diagnosis, I didn’t have an urge to go back and change the story because just as I saw our pre-diagnosis faces, I saw the faces that have come after. Faces that are in fact, marred. Eyes that are weary and laden, smiles both hurting and desperate for relief but also faces that are reflective of a deep, rich, words-fall-short gratitude. 

I’m not gonna lie, I have some very human resentment towards the mystery. If only we could see what’s coming, then we could be more prepared, right?…
…Because the freight trains hurt just way too much.

But as much as I struggle with the mystery, I have accepted the reality that if we were actually responsible for our own lesson planning, our bias would naturally hold back and we wouldn’t be nearly as strong as the mystery offers. Nor as grateful.

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