Of time and movement

We would be nothing without time

Yet time is a heavy burden when waiting for the unknown.

Life's lesson: To make good use of time 

Regardless of its weight on our mind and heart

To paraphrase the late Ronald Dworkin (The Guardian's obit here), life's value is more adverbial than adjectival. That is, it is in the doing and the moving that we generate meaning and effect in our life and for our life. In the end, our life may have been good, bad or something else, but if we do not do our living with intention while we can, the result will be of less consequence and value - to ourselves and to others, also.

It's a good perspective, I think, because without the ambition to keep moving, to keep doing life (which seems different to me than merely living), I would grind to a stand still and just wait. And that would get me nowhere. (Better to scrub the toilet while waiting; at least I'd have a clean toilet out of the waiting!)

So. I keep moving even as my eye is trained on April 23rd, the day of Val's first radiation treatment.

I am haunted - no, that may be overstating it. I am unsettled - that's maybe more accurate. I am unsettled that Val will soon be among the many who walk voluntarily into the radiation treatment room. CancerCare Manitoba provides very good care, but the place is weird in how normal having cancer seems, and how normal it is for so many people to be treated there, treated by people whose work it is to administer chemotherapy and radiation therapy.

Radiation (good explanation in second paragraph here). For some reason I find this next step in Val's treatment more troubling than the four rounds of chemo were. And I can't really figure out why. She suffered very real physical side effects - fatigue, hair loss and changes in appetite - and she will suffer very real physical side effects from the radiation - skin burns, fatigue, and who knows what else, including possible lymphedema in her left (dominant) arm and hand.

Maybe my real fear is that she will go through this horrid-sounding treatment for no real long-term benefit, and she'll be left with lyphedema as a life-long reminder of the pain but no gain. Try as I might, I cannot get this thought out of my mind. Yet, I must - and will - keep moving towards and into this next round of treatment. If I don't, I will be stuck in the never-never land of wanting what is not: Our life without cancer in it.

Life is about making choices, and sometimes those choices don't make easy sense, even when based on statistical evidence and scientific protocols.

So. I keep moving and paying attention to my own stuff (displacement behaviour?), including my final adult ed course. On Tuesday evening, I'll be presenting what I learned about my own learning process while teaching myself how to make biscuits last weekend. Watch the 30-second video (Amanda Makes Biscuits) that I made to include in my presentation.

Here's to waiting. And to keeping on moving...