About Attitude

Many people have told me I have a positive attitude towards my illness, and many people in my situation have no doubt been told by family and friends that you "have to be positive!"
Now, first off, that can be a bit of a burden: having to positive all the time is a great stress for people and in my humble opinion, bloody impossible. Second off, if I wanted to advise someone on how to relate to an illness like cancer should they ever have it, to say "Be Positive!" is actually of little benefit or support. If a person has to Be Positive all the time, it seems to deny the possibility of feeling any other way, and, God knows, if you are ever in the same situation, then you would probably understand that the one thing you would not feel all the time is "positive".
For many people, being positive is like trying to look at everything that happens through rose tinted glasses, analagous to saying, after being hit in the head by a brick, "Ooooh! My goodness! What a lovely brick that was, and what a delightful experience it was getting hit by it!" That is not being positive at all, but being bloody stupid. Being told you have cancer is one heck of a brick to be hit by, and the intelligent response is NOT to go "Ooooh! How wonderful! I have cancer, and what a fantastic opportunity having cancer is!"
So if people tell me I am being positive, and think that means that I do not experience sadness, futility, powerlessness and anger, then I am afraid they are wrong.
My attitude to my cancer, from the very first diagnosis in 2006, to the present day, can be summed up as this:

1. I can either be resposible for having cancer, or I can be a victim of it. In other words, I can think this is just God getting at me, or I can think that for some reason, a part of me decided to give me cancer. If the latter is the case, then I at least have some power in the situation. If I did this to myself, then I can also undo it. If a part of me (my subconscious, say) has given me this cancer, then it must be for a reason, and if I can find out what that is, I can probably make myself well. If, however, a part of me that is deeper and universal (like for example, my soul or universal consciousness) has given me cancer, then that too is for a reason, and I may either recover or not, depending on what that reason is.
2. My behaviour in the present is a function of the future I can see for myself, and if I can see the possibility of survival, then I will behave always in a manner that is consistent with my surviving.
3. I always have a choice. Every moment of every day, I can choose how I respond to having cancer that is potentially incurable.
4. A choice can only be made when all the possible outcomes have been faced. I cannot choose to live if I am simply doing so because I am scared of dying, because that is denial. I have had to face the genuine possibility of my death, and been prepared to choose that as a possible future without turning away from it. In that way, I can choose to believe I will survive. I know that sounds a bit odd, but consider it this way: a person who cannot be bad, because they fear the consequences of it, cannot be said to be choosing to be good! They are only being good because of the fear they have, and so are in fact entirely constrained! To be able to choose to be anything, you have to be able to face being its opposite; if not, you are just being constrained.
5. Every emotional response is valid. It is perfectly normal to cry in this situation, as well as to be angry, frustrated, upset, wondering why, and so on. If you deny any of those emotional responses as being acceptable, then you become twisted and forced into something called "being positive", which, let's face it, has to be unhealthy.

So, when people call me positive, they are only partially right. I have chosen to be responsible, and aware that I can choose my responses every moment of the day. I can only appear to be happy, because I have times when I have also allowed myself to be sad. I can only allow myself to experience this stage of my life as a powerful gift for making me appreciative of every aspect of my life and the world around me, because I have also allowed myself to feel pissed off and frustrated at the prospect of dying.
That has been the power of meditation for me - to experience all the possibilities as well as to visualise all the possible outcomes and choose the ones that give me most power in the here and now.
And I have been well trained in developing responsibility and choice by my experience of years of programmes with Landmark Education.
Without meditation, and without my training in the power of generating my responses to the circumstances, I would not be appearing positive. I'd be a wreck, bemoaning my fate, and constantly crying about the injustice of it all - because if I am perfectly honest, there are people who are far less happily married, far less happy generally, and a damn sight bloody older, as well as a lot less loving and peaceful, who this could have happened to!