Light

Maybe the key thing you learn when you’ve been travelling for 30 hours, mostly over some or another ocean, is how vast water is. And maybe the key thing you learn when you’ve spent the last six months in treatment for cancer is how fragile and ephemeral life is. These two ideas are somehow beautiful next to each other.

We have reached the light at the end of the tunnel. These hours on planes and in airports are the final passage to Next, to the pause, the in-breath between the last six months and the next chapter. Michael and Aidan and I are coming from the east, from our wintery island in the middle of the South Pacific, and Naomi is coming from the west, from the mind-blowing trip she’s just had at the Global Youth Leadership Conference in Vienna, Prague, and Berlin. We facetimed from airport to airport—we were in Singapore and she was in Qatar. We will meet at the Male airport and get on a sea plane to an island one mile long and a couple of hundred yards wide, a patch of sand to rest and reconnect and regrow. Life feels magical.

My sense of the passing of time has shifted now that I’m out of the grey chemo and back into a technicolor life. No longer am I counting down the days, unfolding each morning’s poem with the double delight of opening a beautiful poem and also closing another day. My mind is rejecting the idea of wishing this time would pass more quickly. Even this travel time is to be savoured. The first flight to Melbourne, Aidan quivering with excitement, the kind Qantas steward sad that I wouldn’t eat the dinner they offered (a choice between pork and beef, but I still haven’t been able to bring myself to eat mammals). Our six hour layover where we set off into the dark and cold Melbourne, dragging our suitcases behind us, to eat mediocre sushi at what was clearly a popular university gathering place, the howls of laughter from the self-declared “starving musicians” at the table behind us making each of us smile. The flight to Singapore, making my body economy class origami, folding around and over Aidan as we flew through the night to Singapore. And now here, high over the Indian Ocean, no land in sight, giggling as Michael surgically removed the objectionable KitKat bar from the otherwise palatable ice cream cone (for him—I stuck to the spectacular dark chocolate we brought from home). This time is to be savoured, to be loved, to be remembered. I will never fly for the first time to Male, never fly with a 12-year-old Aidan again.

What would it be like to live the rest of my life with this kind of attention to the present? And what demands does it make on me to craft the kind of life that is does not have days or weeks I want to race through to get to the good stuff?  What if we all believed that all of it is the good stuff?

Neither do I want to grasp, though. It’s easy to not wish to prolong the 5 hour layover in the Singapore airport, but it will be harder to not wish to prolong the magic of swimming with sea turtles, of the thrill of hearing for the first time as Naomi articulates the bigger world she is a part of after her trip. When I get too graspy for any moment of life, suddenly the fear of recurrence and death roar in. I get black moments of that out of nowhere, as Aidan rubs my ever-furrier head, as the sun dips into the sea, as Perry frolics into the hills, his ears blowing back in the wind. I want to freeze time, hold it, not have Aidan grow or Perry die or the sky turn black and cold. But all of these things will happen—and it’s good and right that they happen—and my grasping won’t extend their time for one moment; it’ll just make the moments I have less rich.

So this is my new practice, and it makes sense to go to a tiny island in the middle of the Indian Ocean to begin it. Here is one of the first countries in the world that will be drowned in rising seas; here the balance of sand and tides is always tenuous. Like each of us, with our loves and our fears and our hopes for the future. It is an ancient idea, so simple it hardly bears repeating, and so difficult that people have given their lives over to the practice of it: we live right now. We can mourn what we have lost, who we have not become, the pain or misery or injustice life has brought us. We can fear (or hope) for tomorrow, clutching at those things we don’t want to lose or hurling ourselves towards the mythical better future. But all of that distracts me from the only thing I ever ever have, this moment, which is right here at the back of a Singapore Airlines A330, my hair now a five-o’clock shadow on my head, my boy asleep in the row behind me, my husband’s leg pressed up against mine. The world is all lights, and all tunnels, and all thresholds from what was to what will be next.

Pictures today from the seaplane to the grey destination--magnificent and stormy, like life, really