Shifting gears

I am high over the sand and sage coloured landscape of Australia, on my way from Melbourne to Sydney where I catch my flight home to Wellington. This protracted time away has meant that I have only spent four of the last 23 nights in my own bed. That is unprecedented. Talk about avoidance… I am looking forward to being home and to seeing Michael and the kids and to walking in the hills with Melissa and snuggling with my dogs and wearing different clothes.

And there’s a way this also feels like the end of a chapter in my life and the beginning of the next. This time in the plane is a neutral zone inside a neutral zone (and has all the uncertainty of a tight connection and a late departure). I have had an unusually wonderful month of work, with client gigs even more vivid and vibrant than I’m used to. I have just read the new HBR piece from Kegan and Lahey et al which is stirring and engaging in a way I rarely (ever?) experience from HBR. I am coming off of 1.5 days of teaching complexity to a new client and with a new set of colleagues and watching how this new set of ideas and perspectives makes us all feel powerful and alive in new ways. I am deeply in love with my work and feel honoured to be able to earn a living in this way.

Now, though, is a time to turn from this work time into this internal time of treatment. I will have tests tomorrow to see if the cancer has spread to my lungs or kidneys or liver (highly unlikely, but apparently possible enough so that they want to look around). I will begin chemo Monday.  I listen to my healing meditation about the fountain of magical fluid that will seek out and kill my cancer cells and it really does help. I wear my new necklace as a charm to remind me to hold on to all that is life giving about the chemo, all that is beautiful about it. Today, though, I turned again to the information about what I might expect in chemo, information I haven’t looked at in 8 weeks. I had to quickly put aside the information and turn the meditation back on. The side effects will come or not, and I got the point about which ones I can seek to control (most of my attention seems to go into avoiding or at least discovering infection and avoiding mouth sores). Then I can just let the next chapter unfold.

What have I learned—or deepened into—in this month of work? I have learned that people are amazingly kind, and that their kindness and their attention increases in the face of hardship. I have learned that watching someone really sink into a new idea is a form of awakening that rivals the beauty of dawn breaking behind the Opera House. I have learned that understanding a little more about complexity makes people feel powerful. I have learned that watching children explore and pretend makes me laugh and cry. I have learned that transforming a metaphor also transforms the feelings the metaphor carries, that my words create and are created by my emotions. I have learned that trees are magnificent whether their bark is silky and white or rough and black, and I have wondered why our ideas of human beauty are so narrow when our sense of natural beauty is so broad. I have learned that fear, when we turn toward it, speak about it, and move ahead anyway, connects us deeply to one another. I have learned that I discover new things in every conversation I have with every person I am honoured to work with.

This new chapter will enable a whole new set of things to learn. I can’t say that I’m looking forward to it (though I notice that I am afraid my small infection from the surgery will delay the chemo—and that seems like a bad thing). Keith and I tease about how it might be nice to go to sleep and wake up with the chemo behind me (“Like Rip Van Winkle,” he said, “only balder.”). And while there’s a piece of me that wants that, there is more of me that wants to live this experience too. I intend to live this next chapter as fully as I have lived the last, to look for the beauty of it as well as the misery, and to bask in the love and companionship of those of you who are coming to hold my hand, and those of you who are present only virtually. The other day at a gig I read aloud a blessing by John O’Donohue and as I read I felt it through every cell in my body. And even that is literal right now. My cells are about to be turned over in record time, a chemical peel of the most internal variety. I wonder who I’ll become next. “It is difficult and slow to become new.”

For the Interim Time

(from To Bless the Space Between Us by John O’Donohue)

When near the end of day life has drained

Out of light, and it’s too soon

For the mind of night to have darkened things,

No place looks like itself, loss of outline

Makes everything look strangely in-between,

Unsure of what has been, or what might come.

In this wan light, even trees seem groundless.

In a while it will be night, but nothing

Here seems to believe the relief of dark.

You are in this time of the interim

Where everything seems withheld.

The path you took to get here has washed out;

The way forward is still concealed from you.

“The old is not old enough to have died away;

The new is still too young to be born.”

You cannot lay claim to anything;

In this place of dusk,

Your eyes are blurred;

And there is no mirror.

Everyone else has lost sight of your heart

And you can see nowhere to put your trust;

You know you have to make your own way through.

As far as you can, hold your confidence.

Do not allow your confusion to squander

This call which is loosening

Your roots in false ground,

That you might come free

From all you have outgrown.

What is being transfigured here is your mind,

And it is difficult and slow to become new.

The more faithfully you can endure here,

The more refined your heart will become

For your arrival in the new dawn.