Just another burden to bear. Good burden or bad burden, makes no difference. The bad burden may call out the beauty in another person or traveler calling it a fight summons an energy which is detrimental. Didn’t someone say “war is hell?” Cancer isn’t the best reality but to call it hell is extreme in too many instances. I do feel as if I have had nights in hell but I cannot say that it is a sentence to perpetual hell. For instance, in the American Civil War 700,000 men died in the fight but it was still left to nine men to sit down and craft the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments to the United States Constitution. I always wonder why did so many people have to die in order to arrive at the point which should have been reached through conversation and debate. Cancer shouldn’t have a lexicon rooted in war or hell as there is no legislation and neither is there a truce. I can’t keep thinking of anything, let alone cancer, as a fight. I used to see race as a fight and this meant that I always had to be on an insufferable, unbearable red alert. It hurt me to do this to be in this state. Passing up the beauty in others in order to avoid any incidence of pain and conflict. I’ve come to know that I am indeed on a journey and all things I bear can be seen as either tools to use to help me to reach my destination. “It’s just another day’s journey and I’m glad,” are the opening words of a gospel song I first heard as a child. The choir would follow “and I’m glad” and later, “I’m glad about it.” And the singer would answer, “I’m so glad, yes I am.” That’s is exactly the way I need to define this disease and my life. The life is a journey and the disease is just another burden along the way.
And there are other phrases which make me sit back and think, really think, about the way I’ve been taught to view this disease. If I die while this disease is active it will be said that I lost my fight. How can I lose a fight I didn’t start? Or a war that wasn’t declared? Just how do I fight cancer anyway? Do you understand what I’m trying to tell you? I hope you do. I refuse to say that I’m fighting cancer for this would mean that I was fighting my own body. It gives me peace to know that one day this journey will end. Not just this particular burden but all burdens, gifts, everything you carry with you on the way requires and adjustment. Shifting, deleting, moving some things around. Shoving some things together to make them more compact or dissection of an entire burden that you no longer need or no longer wish to carry. There is no winning or losing as these terms are the property of contest and fight. Pick this up, journey further. Lay this down, adjust the weight, and the journey continues. I cannot spend my life rebelling or extolling the virtues of my burdens. I cannot become enraptured with my ability to bear yet more weight. Burden, in this sense, is not a term of negativity. It’s a statement of fact. I am tall. I am brown. I have dimples. I have cancer. There is no way to tell what effect each one will have until a tally of all journeys is created, if there is indeed a day of tabulation. I am just one of the multitude on the road and my vision cannot encompass the panorama of all human life.
Again, a language, is far more psychologized. It determines getting, or obtaining an exact coordinate for where you would like to be. It seems to be a question and a commentary of place, destination, and locale. It’s not so much what you want to be. What good is it to be beautiful if you’re in a land where blindness is commo? No, if we really consider our journey it is one of being in a place where we will receive the highest return based on how we present or what we bear, how we’re burdened when we arrive at the destination.
Even in Christianity, God’s miracles do not so much require us to be something but to be somewhere, ready, by way of experience or innate gifts, to use our burden to His glory. Elevation. Efficiency (that is, not requiring Him to send multiple travelers set to the same task). The person who follows His direction, seems to never be a particularly exemplary person. But they are people who do not run away from a destination which requires a duty (in example, Moses meeting Pharoah, Esther and her king, and the three shepherd boys who trusted God and boldly faced the fire instead of clawing at the door begging men for release).
And I’ve learned that my burdens do not deserve more attention than my fellow travelers. How many people do we touch along the way? We’ve made this particular burden, cancer, more important than it really is. We’ve turned the word cancer into a term which causes tears, horror, and sadly some decide to end the journey, commit suicide rather than face the possibility of miracles which do not materialize or loss of control as the disease progresses. It is assumed that there will be no more life worth living when the sound, “cancer” is whispered into the wind. I’m wondering if the reality comes because it’s going to come or do we get the reality we believe will come? Suffice it to say that a language has been created which only sees with superficial eyes. The things we think we want are always gifts. The things which an actually turn out to be gifts but at first resound as a sentence of death are burdens (and burdens in our tongue, are never sources of good
