Just a couple weeks after I started chemo, I sat in my bedroom in my parents’ house with a swirling head. My body was still recovering from surgeries and my spirit was trying to burn through the fog of my diagnosis. But my head, oh, it was in fine shape to do what it does best. Swirling thoughts like the backwater eddies of a big river.
I was frustrated. Everything in my life felt paused and on hold while I lived with my parents and recovered from surgery and struggled through chemo. The rush to surgeries and to figure out doctors and appointments and a chemo plan had settled for a bit. Now all there was to do was a new routine of appointments and time between.
Time is such a prickly topic for survivors. We’re in a hurry for treatment to be over, to get back to living our regular lives, to feel good again. At the same time, we want to shrink it all down to just what we need to get there, steeped in the things we love. If we sit still too long, our minds start to ruminate; if we are too busy, our bodies can’t heal.
Taking the pause
I look back now at how unwilling I was to take the pause and do more of what gave me joy. I needed a new mindset around what it meant to be well.
It meant daily naps and walks in the woods and standing in rivers. Catching up with friends over dinner. Sitting at my grandparents’ table and decorating their Christmas tree. It meant working on grad school when I had the strength and not worrying about what wasn’t getting done. I wasn’t weighed down in place by the logistics of my illness. Rather, I really was moving in the pause.
I felt a new movement of time, one where more got done when I embraced the pause. When instead of swirling in my head, I allowed my racing mind to still for a bit while I went on walks. The pause brought clarity on what was most important and that I was doing those most important things.
In this way, I learned so much about movement and stillness, patience and discontent, and that these things don’t necessarily exist on a straightforward spectrum. They bend around to each other like a horseshoe. And sometimes the ends touch.
We can move our bodies and still our minds and be patient with a plan to get on to the next thing. Through patience there is healing and in movement there is peace.
Perhaps you feel a tension wherever you are in your journey through cancer, be it after treatment or in transition to the next phase of your life after cancer showed up. You can find patience and allow yourself stillness to be well while also taking actions to be your best self at this time. You know, I’d argue we all can take this approach. It’s one I continue to work on all the time.
