Transitions

Today has been a day for sinking in, for walking in the hills with Melissa, talking with people I love about loss and hope and change. I’ve been thinking a lot about William Bridges’ theory of transitions. I’ve been teaching about Bridges for years and have found the theory so helpful for many of the transitions I’ve been through (scroll back many years in this blog and you can see me wrestle with the transitional stages to here).

In short, what Bridges says is this: In regular time, we live in regular narrative order: beginnings, middles, and then endings. In times of transition, we live in a backwards order: endings, then the messy middle, and then the beginning. So right now, at the beginning of this cancer journey, I’m grieving some endings.

I’ve been in mourning much of the day, and I’ve tried to trace the threads of loss to find out what matters most. What is it I lose when I have cancer? My left breast, obviously.  Being home after school on Aidan’s first day of high school. Time with all of my business partners (who are also dear friends) and my whole firm as almost all of Cultivating Leadership meets for three days this week (their opening circle during my surgery). Client engagements I’ve been looking forward to for months. And those are just the are tangibles.  There are others: A sense of myself as young(ish) and indomitable(ish)? A sense of the safety of my own body, that my cells are on my side?

I look forward into the neutral zone—this space of fear and uncertainty and potential for new forms of creativity and unexpected discoveries. That gets made manifest in surgery, when I’m in between it all, and afterwards, when my body is not yet what it will be and yet is obviously not what it used to be. I have thought about the neutral zone in so many ways, but never in the healing of the body, never in skin fusing with skin, angry red fading to cool white, pain easing. It gives a new pulse to an old idea, a new set of metaphors about pain and grief and healing that I have never had before. And it gives me a new kind of hope for this neutral zone of all the icky-ness and fear of a hospital visit for this kind of surgery, a new anchor to the potential of creativity and discovery in this dark passage to whatever is next.

Because I really do know that this cancer journey will bring me to a new beginning, a new emerging from the cutting and healing that these next weeks hold. I know that as I remove this cancer, I am also creating new spaces in myself to hold more love, more compassion, more gratitude for being alive than I have been able to hold before. I got an email today from a friend who said she is “sending clouds of love to wrap around all [my] raw edges.” I will hold that metaphor and imagine the love that swirls around me—here at home with Michael and the kids, on the beach with Melissa, tucked into bed with Dolce (who is the most teddy bear like dog I’ve ever seen), drinking tea with dear friends who come to visit, or reading supportive emails from people all around the world. I have never before lived so much of the full spectrum of human emotions in a day or a week, felt such love and connection as well as such aloneness and terror.

Tomorrow my whole Garvey family gets together to celebrate the new year, to toast my cousin just gone to fly Army helicopters in Afghanistan, to kiss the growing children, to bask in the delight of the love that holds this family together through grief and joy. My news will ripple through the crowd and I will feel the warmth and love all the way across the international date line. Last year we were with them in the chilly US winter. Tomorrow I’ll walk in bleached summer blonde hills with Melissa for the last time for a few weeks. Monday I’ll begin the journey that starts with pain and fear and takes me to a new tomorrow. I might hate this transition, but I expect I will grow grateful for it over time.