Something landed with me recently just as I got up from a long night’s sleep, it was pretty close to this;
Easier said than done?
Easier to stay or run?
It showed up as questions, and I can’t recall inviting it or dreaming of something that may have initiated it… it was just there, literally as my feet were finding the floor and my legs were aiming toward the kitchen and the kettle.
It dissipated for several hours and then it floated back and forth a little after showing up a couple or more days ago.
I chose not to let it fester in my head too much as I had other things on and didn’t want to work these uninvited words through until I could sit and write… which happens to be now, in the sun, on my roof, with nothing else that is missing my attention today.
Now these questions get some time and space.
What has happened in my life when I found it easier to just do it rather than say it, and when in my life have I been teetering on a decision to stay with something, or myself, or with another, or to run away and maybe hide from whatever… whoever… was scarring me?
Is there a link between… saying and doing, and, staying and running away?
If the options are telling somebody something I may feel would be hard for them, and just doing the thing I was thinking about without sharing my plans with them, how do I make that choice?
Then, this shows up, before this writing, analysing, undoing had offered itself to me, before I had given these few words as questions much thought… I got a phone call yesterday from the cancer clinic that is attached to the UCL hospital in Euston, London.
The young person who is the assistant to the consultant who diagnosed my newly found bone marrow cancer a few weeks ago, was calling to get me booked in to start my treatment, that would, if all goes well, reduce the symptoms of this cancer and pretty much keep me alive for a good while yet.
They also gave me the final results from the bone marrow biopsy I had a few weeks ago.
And confirmed that of the three possible cancer outcomes, I have the one that is the easiest to treat and has the lowest risk of shortening my life dramatically.
So, from those words that showed up a few days ago, to the confirmation of my biopsy results, my feelings last night went to… when is it easy to tell someone, or myself, something I fear and really don’t want to hear, and when can I just run away from something or chose to stay with it?
Something about knowing and not knowing going on too.
For… six weeks ago… I had been told that I have a blood cancer and also that it might take a few weeks to confirm exactly what the cancer I had might do to me.
The easiest cancer to manage was described at not life changing, and treatable with daily oral chemotherapy, and, the least easy cancer, as leaving me with at best three years left to live, with no real treatment available.
I’m finding it hard to consider that this liminal not quite knowing space has only been six weeks, as I sit here today it feels as if it was much longer.
Maybe thats to do with this change in the season, six weeks ago it was cold and raining a lot around the country, and today, and the last few days, it’s been sunny, the buds and the leaves on the trees are showing up… and February seems a kind of lifetime ago.
And maybe it’s because when I am reminded of my precarious mortality, and left in that not knowing and somewhere and nowhere space… each hour and each day seems to have more relevance?
So here I am, saved, relatively…
landed in some bother…
that might not be too bothersome,
and I find myself feeling into the ways I relate to this reality,
this reality that reminds me I know some stuff,
and other times leads me to dare consider these unknowns…
what if’s…
maybe this or that is not how we were taught to think it is…
imagine a world where every thing is open, possible, not fixed in this material sense system.
And, I am still not sure what those words…
easier said than done,
easier to stay or to run…
were offering, sharing, or where they are emerging from.
This need to know hey, this fear of knowing,
this culturally embedded fear of not knowing,
not passing the tests… not being considered as bright.
Someone said to me recently;
“People think I’m thick, as in, fucking stupid.”
At the time, I thought this was them feeling a bit fragile, then I thought about how clever this person was… and now I am thinking about how the ways they are stupid too sometimes, really connects me to them and I love them even more and they are important to me, clever and stupid.
So there is something here, I love that I am bright, I know that I can be clever, and in roughly equal measure… I know that I am often stupid and not at all clever.
And I know those friends I love the most, are also like this.
Staying and running away… may it open space to become playing and falling over?
Saying and doing… may it invite neither, either, and/or both… my doing is my saying… and sometimes… my saying becomes my doing?
My ruin?
My undoing?
Do I need to know what these last few lines since… not being considered as bright… mean… or where they came from or whether they are clever or stupid or both… and maybe you know what I am going to say now… I don’t know… or need to know, cos it is always and never just a straight know… thankfully.
Pic, shadow of a ceramic mask seller that I bought for my Grand Mother many decades ago, she gave it back to me just before she died.