I especially don't want to give "cancer" credit for making me enjoy life more. I feel stubborn about that. It's like when you lose a great tree from a tremendous windstorm that tears through your yard, and then afterwards you hate to admit that the extra light on the garden is kind of nice. You want to be upset about the tree.
No, that's not quite right.
It's more like getting cancer peels off a layer of something -- maybe it metaphorically takes your clothes off. I think that's it. So hot feels hotter (think metal bench in August) and cold feels colder, and everything is more pointedly itself. Maybe this is what people at nudist colonies are after -- that sense of "I'm awake now!" you must get when you walk naked into a room full of people.
Whatever it is like, I have ended up acutely, intensely, naked-on-a-hot-bench aware of the passing of time. Time seems absurdly fast and life almost comically short. I feel like that guy at the end of 2001: A Space Odyssey, where he is just getting more and more wide-eyed as he careens through space and time, wrinkling before our eyes. Whether I die at 60 or at 90, I cannot imagine thinking this was any other than a ridiculously fast free-fall -- like that other guy, the one who stepped away from his balloon, 24 miles up, and fell toward Earth at 800 miles an hour. Except in emotional time you don't have a spacesuit, and your cheeks are flapping against the air and you are leaving a trail of saliva as you fall.
Which actually happened to me once on the Hellevator ride at Six Flags, where they lift you straight up and then drop you down suddenly. I came off that thing with a line of saliva UP the entire length of my face, and all I had done was open my mouth as we dropped three stories.
Anyway. I am having more free fall, saliva-up-the-face moments as time goes by. It's good and it's hot and it's sometimes freezing cold. It's all over the place, like this post. I am not complaining; just trying to report out.
An example of this merging of the sublime and the ridiculous I am experiencing: Laura bought me a new pair of knee socks when she was out the other day. I hadn't known I'd needed knee socks, but it turns out they were JUST the thing.
Note that I still can't resist the temptation to pick up a little piece of schmootz on the floor in the midst of dancing. Dang! I am so far from enlightenment, and there is so little time.
Really?????? You rode something that dropped you three floors?????!!!!!!! I know you're talkin' big stuff here. Enlightenment and lessons learned from the likes of cancer and all that important stuff......but three floors? Dropped? Oh, man! You are so much closer to enlightenment than I'll ever get to in this free-fall of a lifetime, p!
ReplyDeletePaula,
ReplyDeleteWow, so much material to comment on in this wonderful post! Want to get this out, although disjointed, before we lose our power.
I am afraid of heights. I get a queasy feeling in the pit of my stomach standing on my fire escape even though I know and trust it’s sturdy because I watched it being built by my own capable son. I hate roller coasters but I have gone on them to please my daughter who seems serene sitting next to me as I scream my head off. I even went on the Tower of Terror in Disneyworld (sudden drop of 199.0 ft!) with her when she was 12 years old. The photo that they take to sell to you at the ride’s end was revealing in its terrible contrast. I didn’t buy it and not only because the price was obscene.
People used to say to my late husband, after his terminal cancer diagnosis, that he "should live each day like it was his last". We tried that for awhile and definitely had some fun but we both found it exhausting. Mostly, what he craved was not a round-the-world trip but normalcy and ordinariness for as long as possible. That meant going to work, going to the grocery store, cooking, reading the NYT. The day is set aside his daily Times was one of the days that broke my heart.
There is, of course, a scientific theory about why time seems to speed up as we get older, cancer or no cancer:
http://www.npr.org/blogs/krulwich/2010/02/01/122322542/why-does-time-fly-by-as-you-get-older
The prescription to slow things down is to keep introducing novel experiences as we age. Or maybe a new pair of knee socks and a good kitchen dance is all we really need to tap into the joy of our earliest days.
I hope you get that existential medal, Paula. You deserve it.
Oddly, I recently feel as if everything is slowing down. Perhaps because I have been doing less & less. I did the freefall=hated it.
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