#310 Good Times or Bad, Now is the Time to Engage Reality

     In a recent NYT article: "Living With Cancer: Truthiness," ovarian cancer patient Susan Gubar writes: "The perplexity of this situation is captured by a word coined by Stephen Colbert: truthiness. Truthiness is a perception that a person feels to be true or claims to know intuitively without any regard to facts or objective investigation. A perception that a person feels to be true: I not only look OK, I feel fine. Yet the rising blood marker and the scan prove me to be ill. These antithetical perspectives split me in two. The disjunction between lived experience, on the one hand, and scientific evidence, on the other, cleaves my spirit. It distresses me that my oncologist resides with truth, I with truthiness."
     One reader ("Jan") commented: "Living with the 'unknown' is terrible and frustrating which I imagine is just another side effect of the illness."       http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/04/04/living-with-cancer-truthiness/

     Most of us look and feel fine much of our lives. Yet every single one of us dies - unknown is when and how. Even if we're spectacularly healthy and incredibly fit, like an athletic friend who recently passed away, "we are so lightly here" (Leonard Cohen). Life is so complex that it is essentially unknowable, unpredictable and uncontrollable, yet we delude ourselves that we have it all under control. When we're feeling fine, we also manage to pretend that this will last forever, or even improve, if we just try harder. The only certainty in life - our own & everyone else's death - we somehow manage to categorize as unknown, terrible, frustrating, tragic, a shock.
     We really need to become more realistic - we have to deeply check into reality. Scientific medicine plays an important peripheral role in our lives. It certainly does not know everything, and can control even less.
     Each one of us needs to take ownership of our own precious finite life, and evolve as much as we can in this one short life. Meditation practice is key. Starting a meditation practice when relatively young and healthy is wise, and is bound to be easier than when we're old and critically ill.
     "not all people grow from crisis. Some refuse to accept the need for redefinition, and orchestrate their own intellectual and emotional shutdown. Those who do grow manage to stay awake to the anguish, confusion, and self-doubt. This requires a high degree of tolerance for discomfort, as well as the ability to see the world as it is, not as they wish it to be. Over time, the people who continue to struggle emerge wiser, kinder and more resilient. After they have broken and rebuilt themselves, they feel less breakable." Mary Pipher

     See also: http://mindfulnessforeveryone.blogspot.ca/2012/08/172-adapt-or-perish.html
     and: http://www.johnlovas.com/2012/01/transitions.html

Mr. Pickles in Deep Meditation - Photo: P. Michael Lovas