Personal tragedy and loss - Looking for Waldos

People have told me that they admire how I can stay positive through my battle with cancer. Honestly, I don't really understand it fully, myself, but I have thought about the subject a lot.

Face it, no matter how hard we try to travel through life in a straight line our course in life looks like the scribblies of a preschooler. Suffering and personal tragedy is not given only to certain unlucky individuals in the world. It is something that all human beings have in common. Wars, plagues, ethnic cleansings, famine, and disease dominate human history. Suffering and personal tragedy are a part of every human being's experience who has ever lived.

Acceptance of this reality has helped me realize that I am not the only victim of suffering and personal tragedy in the world. I think to myself, "I am a human being, things like this happen to people every day. It is very scary, it hurts, and its sad. It's also comes with being human."

As Americans we feel entitled to pensions, steady economic growth, a house, car, computer with high-speed Internet, secure job, retirement, social security, and a plethora of other entitlements (especially the baby boomer generation, but Generation Xers not so much).

As Americans, we are blessed with a life expectancy of 77.6 years. The other day I heard someone say when they heard that a 76 year old man died, "Wow, that's young." I couldn't help thinking, "Are you kidding!" If you think of the longevity of people in developing countries like Botswana have a life expectancy of 33.9 years.

So, what can I do with this insight? I can wallow in self-pity, become extremely cynical, hide myself from other people, and act out angrily toward others... and I have done all these things and continually fight against doing these things on a daily basis.

What I realized is that that is no way to live life. Sure, I am still somewhere in the grieving process (http://www.hns.org/Portals/1/Stages%20of%20Grief.pdf) and it takes work and time to finally reach acceptance.

Whether I have ten months, ten years or ten decades to life I would rather live life with another mindset. I live each day thinking, "Wow, I am alive. Today is a bonus day. Life is a gift - not an entitlement."

So, where does Waldo fit into all of this?

In January 2006 I was lying in a hospital bed with a fresh hole in my skull and cancer eating away at my precious nervous system. Things couldn't get much worse; however I felt greatful. Maybe it was all the narcotics, but I still think of my enlightenment in this way:

In the chaos of life we scan the pages of life looking for happiness. Much like a kindergartener looks for Waldo in the pages of a "Where's Waldo" book. For me, the intense physical pain and realization that I was so close to dying somehow drained the chaos off the page of the Waldo book into a puddle of ink on the floor. All that was left on the pages of life were/are all the Waldos staring at me.

to be continued...