Recently, a client of mine had a scare that she could possibly have cancer. Her diagnosis turned out to be benign however the moments of not knowing whether or not she would be diagnosed with the disease shifted her whole worldview. No longer could she remain passive about those things, which she had put on hold. In these tense moments, her life hovered before her, floating between the earthly realm and the divine. And she began to question everything – from the way she spent her days blindly checking off her list of things to do, to her disconnected relationship with her husband, to her passion for painting that she had never fully acknowledged or manifested.
In my novel The Gossamer Thread, one of the characters, Steven is diagnosed with esophageal cancer. Like my client, he undergoes a sense of urgency that he must be proactive: “To make the decision to live, he had to be wholly committed to his life. He could no longer live in a semi-conscious state, hoping and telling himself that tomorrow he would recognize his dreams or become satisfied with his relationship. The time to awaken was now – to be fully alive, he had to be completely devoted to himself, his dreams, his life.”
When we are told we could have cancer or are labeled as a cancer patient, our whole life flashes before our eyes. All of the days that melded into one another now become crystal clear. We embrace time much differently than we did before. We no longer crave sleep, we yearn to be awake, to exhale the air around us as if it were our last breath. For we now recognize that the script we are in will end in just a few pages and that our last brush strokes are drawing near – our book is closing, our breath is waning.
The character Feather in my novel teaches us to embrace life (and death) with this urgent awareness. Urgent – not connoting anxiety, but signifying the fleetingness of time and the ephemeral quality of our nature. We must listen to Feather for she is within us. We are only visitors here, fallen from an Angel’s wing or from another dimension, longing to return back to our original home. The sicknesses we encounter, the hatred and the ugliness that envelops our planet are only reminders to fully embrace our lives with this sense of urgency, welcoming and celebrating each and every moment.