Going Rambling

As there is little of any medical stuff going on, I'm going to ramble on about something I have been thinking of a lot in recent months.

Actually I have been thinking about it a lot longer than that really - I've even spent time in a Buddhist Monastery, done the Alpha Course that's advertised on all the buses, and generally speaking, chewed it over a lot for a long time. It's not unrelated to what I do, which I think is one of the reasons I enjoy what I do so much. As I have said, what I do, in the simplest of terms, is write and run training courses. The ones I used to love most to deliver were the ones where I didn't have to tell people anything (well, not much anyway), and they would learn and develop for themselves. These were "open bound" type courses, where teams of executives would have a series of tasks, and get feedback on their leadership and team style, and all that jazz. After running these courses, the people who attended would often tell me it had an amazing impact on their lives, because they were clearer about what they wanted to do and how they might go about doing it: another reason I loved running them. But my absolute favourite was a course called Future Mapping, which I wrote a few years ago now, and is still run on a regular basis by a friend of mine. What the course does is give people the opportunity to discover (or design) a purpose or meaning for their life. Now I know that sounds a bit grand, but I swear to you on all I hold dear, that is what it did and still does. The reason I raise it here is not to show you what a fantastic guy I am (that, after all, is a given), but because it relates directly to this thing I have been thinking about a lot - namely, what does it all mean? What is it all about? Why am I here? And all those thorny existential problems most of us don't talk about much. Actually, one close friend of mine believes that I am the only person he knows who has been in a mid-life crisis since he was 18! And what's worse is, I agree with him! If that is the case, then I have been working on this thorny issue for 29 years now, and should have some answers, or at the very least, some informed opinion about it.

I was given a book recently (I think I mentioned it in an earlier post) called Man's Search for Meaning by Viktor E. Frankl. Frankl was a holocaust victim, and in his book he writes about the experiences he and his fellow inmates had in the concentration camps, and his observations of what helped people survive. One of the key things, he determined, was that the person had to have a meaning for their life, a meaning or purpose for which they would survive this experience. Without it, he says, people in the camps would die very quickly. Most importantly though (for me, anyway) was the fact that he says people could discover or create this meaning or purpose for their lives themselves - he believed this so much, that after the war, he went on to create a school of psychotherapy called logotherapy, where he helped people determine this meaning for their life as a way of resolving current problems in their life. He even goes so far as to say that people have to discover a meaning for their life, for to not do so leads them to a life full of problems.

Even before I read the book, I was thinking a lot about my cancer, and what the purpose my having it could be, and it also had me think about what the purpose for my life had been to this point. I'd actually already decided I had one purpose, namely to assist others in expanding what is posible for them in their life - hence the training courses I loved to write and run were all about increasing choices for people, in whatever walk of life they were in and whatever their current job title. But I have, in the last couple of years realised I also have had another meaning and purpose for my life. Frankl reports in his book people who could conjure up the face of a loved one in the direst of circumstances in the camp, and this loved one, and the eventual reunion with them after the camps, was their reason for staying alive. This loved one, and the times they would share together, was the meaning for their life. For me, Sarah and Emma have been the meaning for my own life, my purpose having been to love them as much as possible, to give Emma the best start in life possible, and to give Sarah as much love as I could. For years now, having a wonderful life with my wife and daughter has given my life all the meaning it could ever have needed.

And now, with cancer potentially taking me from the two of them, and the knowledge I have of the grief and pain my death would bring, they represent more than enough reason for me to survive. Yet if I don't, my illness will have still had meaning for me, and that meaning is twofold. First, I have been given the opportunity to know life is not about the small and trivial concerns most of us make it to be: it's not about what job you have, what status you perceive you have, or about what you own, or even what you have learnt. It is simply about living life and knowing how miraculous it is that you are living it, how amazing it is you exist at all, and that something like love is available to you to experience. Although I might have known that in theory before my illness, I have been given the chance to be it and live it fully as a truth. Secondly, I have been given the opportunity to tell people about my cancer experience, and to thereby serve either as an example of how to survive it, or as an example of how to die with grace, having given it my all, and in some peverse way enjoyed myself in the face of it. (Actually, not perverse at all, as I have enjoyed being the recipient of so much love and care, of being told by people I have contributed to their lives, to do anything other than have enjoyed it would be the perverse thing.)

That does not take away the fact I would much rather not be going through this, but with such a context for it, it is made easier for me to bear.