Wake Up!

I spend part of my life walking around half asleep.  Today I received another wake up call.  A friend let me know that she’s been diagnosed with thyroid cancer.  Now, this girl is  in her early 30′s, not an age when you expect to fight a life threatening disease. 

When I was young, I naively believed there was a natural progression that happened in everyone’s lives.  But, as I’ve experienced the world, I’ve become very aware that this is simply not true. 

I don’t know why some suffer illness at a young age, why some people survive and others do not.  I don’t know why I was fortunate enough to be born in the United States, a place where opportunity is abundant, while others live in relative poverty.  I only know that, whatever life presents us with, we have the choice to be bold and courageous.  It’s not the easy choice.  But I hope that, as I grow wiser, it’s the choice I make more often.  Barbara Kingsolver wrote something that expresses everything I’m feeling right now.  I hope you are as inspired by it as I am.

“Every one of us is called upon, probably many times, to start a new life.  A frightening diagnosis, a marriage, a move, loss of a job…And onward full tilt we go, pitched and wrecked and absurdly resolute, driven in spite of everything to make good on a new shore.  To be hopeful, to embrace one possibility after another – that is surely the basic instinct…Crying out:  High tide!  Time to move out into the glorious debris.  Time to take this life for what it is.”

Barbara Kingsolver from High Tide in Tucson

 

I will be back tomorrow with a report on the finale from the Biggest Loser and my results to-date.