Slow the Spinning World
Having a summer dinner with a dear friend recently, I asked if he had fully recovered from a recent acute, but severe, illness. He spoke succinctly of a shared experience worth highlighting. When we’re not feeling well, getting better is all we can think of. When we’re in pain, we are riveted to the discomfort. Demands of life, the minutiae, the relationships, and to-do lists fade away. All that matters is that we get better. And when we’re better, all that stuff comes rushing back! Our worlds are filled with demands and thoughts and people that pull at us, it’s challenging to even recall, that so many ‘important things’ are really not that important at all.
When I was in treatment for cancer some years back, I experienced a kaleidoscopic sense of my world simultaneously shrinking and becoming unrecognizable: doctor visits slamming into thoughts of mortality; CT scans bumping into walls of fatigue; nausea and pain overlapping with changes from surgical procedures. My medical practice, teaching and writing, my peppy family and social life and my giving, high energy person, went quiet. The clarion call was to remain focused on the task at hand: stay as healthy as possible to handle treatments I needed. And more to the point, it felt exactly right. Without even trying, I stopped paying attention to the chatter, the clutter, the whirlwind of life, as so many demands fell away.
