Lung Cancer Draws Some Mean Lines

October 10, 2021

Unsettled

It’s been hard to get started on this post. Not for want of something to say– it is me writing, after all <cue eye roll> — but because I really want this post to mark a new point in my cancer journey. This longing started some weeks ago, when I picked up the book, Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals, by Oliver Burkeman. (Here’s an interview with the author.)

I’m not one for self-help-ish reads, but a review piqued my interest. So, I checked the book out of the library. As I started reading, I immediately felt some of my perspectives teeter. Then, after relinquishing it to the next person on the library waiting list, I actually bought it. In hardcover– something I never do. I’ve since spent time writing back to parts of chapters I highlighted (in our library app, you can export digital highlights to a spreadsheet), trying to identify the wobble points and, more important, the questions it’s prodding me to ask.

The thing is, Four Thousand Weeks is a book that will probably be significant for any reader, not just someone on a road trip with cancer. If you happen to pick up a copy, I’d be curious about how it strikes you.

Four Thousand Weeks Is Not About Time Management

It’s about the question, if you had 4,000 weeks in which to live and you knew it, what would you choose to do? To affirm? To not do?

Burkeman figures a typical life span is, you guessed it, about 4,000 weeks. We don’t live with that knowledge in the front of our thinking, though. In fact, Burkeman argues that we are so incredibly uncomfortable even acknowledging the finitude of our lives, the inescapable limits to what we can accomplish, that we try to “manage” time so we can avoid thinking about what that finitude means for our lives today, this hour, this minute. We take on more than we can reasonably do– in fact, we imbue everything we do with a sense of it needing to be of historic importance. And, we point to societal norms as our reasons for doing so. We attribute our sense of overwhelm to a lack of time management skill. We procrastinate and distract ourselves with technologies to avoid confronting the very difficult realities of the (unreasonable) shortness of our lives.

But Four Thousand Weeks isn’t a lecture masquerading as a chapter book. It’s a meditation that unfolds chapter by chapter, each chapter building on what came before. In each, Burkeman draws on philosophers, religious scholars and spiritual teachers, artists, writers to help him help us think differently about time, and about living.  He doesn’t load up the narrative with these folks, but he makes them part of the conversation he is having with each reader. And by the time you realize it is a conversation, by the time Burkeman says that time is not transactional, by the time he says, “We are time,” you find yourself nodding in complete understanding– and agreement.

Lung Cancer’s Relentless Boundaries

CancerShrink asked me if I was able to find respite from the looming always-ness of cancer. I initially said meditation and writing helped. But cancer creates situations that encompass much more than diagnosis, treatment, wash-your-hands-of-it, now-you’re-done. Something related to cancer is always in sight.

For example, I’m currently taking three medicines: Medicine A to resolve lung damage from treatment, Medicine B to prevent different damage from happening as a result of Medicine A, and Medicine C to protect my stomach from both A and B. (Then there’s Medicine D, which won me a medical ID bracelet in the Aren’t-You-Lucky-Lottery of Look-What’s-New. But enough of that.)

I’m trying to build back endurance. I can walk a couple of miles without watching my heart rate spike (a sign of improving fitness) or needing to go to bed at 8:30 p.m. Last week, on a lovely October day, someone asked when I thought I’d be able to ride my road bike again. I was able to answer immediately: I would be strong enough by spring. Spring.

But I’m itchy. Burkeman’s thoughts sent me into the past to look at assumptions and expectations undergirding some life choices I made. They have helped me identify things that matter most to me now. I think Burkeman’s biggest challenge is how to live into these understandings in the world. How might cancer change that for me? Will it?

Yesterday, I wondered if it might be a good time to think about increasing my out-of-the-house Covid activity level– I joke that I go almost nowhere and do almost nothing– but my husband reminded me I’m still pretty immunosuppressed. Duh– I forgot about that.

So, for now, cancer establishes very real, very finite parameters for my life. It’s a smaller life than I would like; accepting that is part of my current work. How to identify, own, and honor what matters most within those parameters– that’s the job. Down the road, it’s what I’ll try to bring into being in the wider world.

Just not today.

And that is a very hard thing to accept.

Images

• Road Dog by Pexels from Pixabay
• Time Jumper by h. koppdelaney is licensed for sharing under CC BY-ND 2.0
• Bali Temple Monk by h. koppdelaney is licensed for sharing under CC BY-ND 2.0 She quotes Douglas Adams:

“I may not have gone where I intended to go, but I think I ended up where I intended to be.”