Does Cancer Give Us Perspective?
“Will’s dead.”
“Dead?”
“He got cancer shortly after you left England and died a few months ago, sadly.”
I wanted to get up and do something – anything. Cancer! At such a young age. My immediate thought was of a purely selfish nature…What if it was me?
It could be me. More thoughts feeding into each other. Would I be ready to die? What have I actually done with my life? Am I worrying about the right things? Would Rachel be okay?
I used to work with Will. We only spoke on a handful of occasions. His reputation was justified, I thought. He was the nicest guy you’d meet with his career firmly in his own hands. He’d just bought a house with his wife.
Who knows what will take me or when I’ll go. It may not be cancer, of course.
We all think about these things. However, you become screamingly aware of your own mortality when a tragedy occurs so close to home.
Have I travelled enough? Have I appreciated the little things enough? Do my family know how much I appreciate them?
My father had cancer a few years ago, and like many before him, he survived it. It isn’t necessarily a killer. Yet, it pushed me, more and more, to think about how much I’d miss if I died – a morbid thought, but a necessary one.
The world is massive and its population has topped 7 billion. I need to see more of it, to meet these people, to make the most of myself. I’ve always been motivated to improve myself. Learning languages was proof of that, or so I thought. But now I need to improve myself in different ways.
I need to start asking myself the right questions. I need to eliminate the word ‘should’ from my vocabulary. I need to use the time more effectively. This doesn’t mean running around trying to get things done. It means using those seconds, minutes, or hours for that task and that alone – immersing myself in that moment. My days of meditation taught me that. I wonder why I stopped meditating? Wrong question! I really need to start appreciating others more.
Living a life in tribute to a lost one is never a bad thing, but I need, above all, to not use the threat of death as my motivator or inspiration. There’s enough beauty in the world to move every one of us infinitely. I need to pay more attention to it.
More than anything, the questions I need to start asking myself now are: How do I make this day a good one? and How do I keep this new perspective alive?
To Will, and my friends Sara, and Ian. They died too young.
