Worrying about the Future

When you have cancer, all is subsumed beneath it. Then, when you wonder if it is gone or not, you worry about if it will return and whether you can live out a whole life without its reoccurance. I've stated that before, but as I lurge back in fits and starts to some sort of health, it is becoming more and more of a concern. Looking back at the past year or so, it is hard not to think that something MUST be wrought from pain and fatigue. But is it to be, and what's the point if the disease is to return. What is the point of getting better if there is only a return to illness. The point - if there is one - is re-examination, survival, another look at the world, before the eyes go blank and the skin grows tight and useless. It is to find some hope in the mere act of survival and the actions of daily life. Ritual is what we fail to see when we see through healthy eyes and strong bodies. The rituals of daily life, the first cup of coffee in the morning, watching children in the park down the street, sitting for a cup of green tea or - gasp - yet another moccacino in a cafe, while you write or watch people from behind the glass, or in the chair across from you. These rituals, the spaces of our lives, the cracks in the sidewalks of activities of the healthy. We do not realize or notice them. They escape the atention of the healthy. Or if they capture the attention of those so blessed it is only as a moment of relaxation, or a place to gather energy for the rest of the day or the week to come. But these cracks where daily concerns slip away ARE our real life. Work, is a mere economic engine to keep us alive. Our children will grow and capture lives of their own from the air as we have before they lived. The only true permanance is in the rituals themselves, not in the people which inhabit them.

"How very nice," writes Nikos Kazantzakis, "it was to be alive with all five senses - the five doors through which the world enters - working well. How very nice to say, The world is fine, I like it." (Kazantzakis 1965, 343). Whether the world is fine or not, it is better to see it through healthy eyes than it is to see it through sick ones. It is better to feel it through strong fingers that grasp tightly the branches of spring trees re-emerging with leaves, than it is with skeletal hands that can only grab weakly and must let go because of the pain of the grasping. To grasp is to remind oneself of life, and to be alive. So we grasp rituals, for they centre us. We can be ourselves and though the cast of our lives may change the ritual, the feeling the inhabits the mind and the actions of the hand remains the same. We feel through our senses, and our sense exchange something of themselves to the world and together they produce memory and ritual. Ritual which is the outward face of memory for it grasps us with its fingers and reminds us of the many occasions of the past and gives us hopre for the many rituals to come. We fade in its grasp and come to ourselves at the same time.

Balzac writes, "The she went back to her room, gathered together, as it were, into a single thought, all the thousand and one delights of that day; and after long contemplation of the picture she had made of her memories, she fell asleep, the happiest creature in Paris." (Balzac 1962, 207). We are each our own artists, draing together the paintings of the day and of our life outward onto larger canvases. These are our lives and when we concentrate we can see the smallest detail of our existence. And we paint with the minutest strokes and with the greatest precision in those time between memory and the future, when we grasp daily lives with the hands of ritual and relax and are. Each day is a lifetime, a painting, painted with action and tears and pain and love and voices. Each day passes us by and we pass by it. And capture it in the paintings we draw at night with the brushes that our parent gave us and the brushes we have created for ourselves. Ritual is that moment when we stand back and stare at what we have painted and consider how we will continue later. It is this moment, standing back that conncets our lives. There is no Language for ritual, only action and being. It is pure spirit. The one thing all matter contains. Eli Mandel, the Canadian poet, states, "The m0on has no language." (Mandel, 2000). There is no language for existence but ritual and being. The ritual of daily rising. The rituals that are threatened by illness and gain more power and significance because of these threats. They signify our lives. Our failures. Our victories. Our glory. Our weakness. Our Pain. And the pains we give to others. They are a symbol for our lives.

Alice Munro has a character state, "What I need is a rest. A deliberate state of rest, with new definitions of luck." (Munro, 1982, 128). Luck, it seems to have passed the ill by. It seems that its threats have killed the idea of luck. We have been cast from Eden, to live lives of OUR choosing; of OUR design, to grow up from the innocence of garden life, to the beauty of the adult world, where pasions and pain reside. We can remember Eden with pleasure, but know that freedom to choose is what makes humans human. "The world was before them, where to choose their place of rest..." is what Milton writes of Adam and Eve (Milton, 2005). Luck is living and still having those choices and in not worrying about the wisdom of the choce but reveling in the choosing itself. We are artistic creations, created by ourselves and the sick know that William Morris was right when he spoke of choosing for your home nothing "...which you do not know to be useful or believe to be beautiful." (Morris 1880). The wisdom is the choosing, for your home and for yourself. For the artistic creation which bears your name and your face and is composed of your memores and desire and wishes and loves and your past. We should choose wisely and choose for ourselves.

References:

Balzac, Honore de. Old Goriot. Translated by M. A. Crawford. Penguin Classics, 1962.

Kazantzakis, Nikos. Report to Greco. Translation by Bruno Cassirer Ltd. Faber and Faber, London. 1989.

Mandel, Eli. "The Mad Woman of the Plaza de Mayo," in The Other Harmony: The Collected Poetry of Eli Mandel. Ed. by Andrew Stubbs and Judy Chapman. Canadian Plains Research Centre. Regina, 2000.

Milton, John. Paradise Lost. Ed. by Godon Teskey. Norton Critical Editions. W. W. Norton and Co. New York, 2005.

Morris, William. "On Simplicity," (1880) in William Morris on Art and Design. Ed. by Christine Poulson. Sheffield Academic Press. 1996.

Munro, Alice. "Bardon Bus" in The Moons of Jupiter. MacMillian of Canada. Toronto, 1982.