Fate

In parallel with the recent bad news of continued chemotherapy and my infatuation with fasting, I’ve received many messages of support, praising my strength and will to fight.  I appreciate all of them.  Every warm word lifts me up a little.  Unfortunately, they’re all slightly misguided.  I am not a strong person.

I tend not to pursue goals with purpose.  If I’m not ahead, I give up easily.  I slack with passion.  The rigors of prolonged fasting are obviously not something I enjoy.  I’d much rather not do it, but the alternative is grim.  I have to fast because the situation requires it.  Everyone in my position would do the same.

Fasting for three days requires strength and determination if it is done for nebulous reasons like well-being, detoxification or elusive weight loss.  Fasting out of necessity doesn’t.  If there is no alternative, one can’t give up.  I keep going, no matter how painful it is.  How could a little hunger or lack of energy make me lower my chances of beating the cancer and, eventually, surviving?

In the Michael Jordan documentary I mentioned a few posts back (and which was about eight episodes too long), MJ is characterized as a man who most emphatically lives in the present.  No thoughts for things that might go wrong in the future, no regrets for actions taken in the past that weren’t exactly right in retrospect but needed to be taken in the moment.

Seeing this focus on the moment presented as something positive, as the key to his success even, surprised me a bit.  I’ve come to take it for granted that my goals for the next five years are frequently probed.  In contrast, Michael would never worry for a second that a shot he hadn’t taken yet might miss the target.  For Michael, the goal was always to play the best basketball possible.  This can be applied to the next fives years, but it’s not exactly concrete.

I can identify with this.  I fight the cancer during each chemotherapy session as much as I can.  I don’t worry about the outcome.  I don’t think about the sessions ahead.  Things are happening now.  This is where I have to be, and this is where I am.  I also don’t think about the cancer between the sessions.  This time is for recovery.  This attitude helps me not be overwhelmed by hopelessness.

I can take it one step further, and use it to explain how fasting doesn’t take any strength.  I’m a fatalist at heart.  Things happen for a reason, and we all have to deal with them.  Fate has handed me colon cancer, but this is not something dispiriting.  I don’t lose my mind questioning it.  I simply reinterpret this fate and see it as something positive.

And so it has become my fate to fight this cancer and to do everything I can to beat it.  As much as it hurts, I accept this fate and take the actions demanded by it.  I fast for three days until my legs tingle with weakness and my brain becomes jelly.  If that’s what it takes, that’s what I’ll do.