The Force is Strong in You...

“Life is thickly sown with thorns, and I know no other remedy than to pass quickly through them. The longer we dwell on our misfortunes, the greater is their power to harm us.” – Voltaire

If something is inspirational then it must burn a fire deep inside you and make you want to changes your approach to life. More than just wanting to change it, an inspiration actually makes you change your life. I have seen the horrors of cancer, not from looking in the mirror, but rather from looking at the rest of the world; through those horrors I have seen the truly inspirational. It is not inspirational to simply endure a difficult time; rather, in order to be inspirational, I think the trial must be pitiable, but also be so profound that it shakes the souls of those who observe and call them to change their lives.

My first surgery was in the summer of 2006 to implant my mediport in my right chest and to perform a laparoscopy of my lung. While in the waiting to be taken back to have an IV placed into my arm, I had my eye on a little girl. She was no more than four years old, and she was balder than a cue ball. She had no hair, no eyelashes, no eyebrows and piercing baby blue eyes. She smiled at me and turned back to her coloring book in which she was making an interesting looking duck with a brown beak, purple and red feathers, black feet, and, fittingly, baby blue eyes. Then my heart broke. She tried to get at a certain angle to color in the clouds yellow and the IV tube in her arm that flowed back and was attached to a seven-foot wheeled stand filled with chemicals wiggled the needle in her arm and she yelped in pain and her eyes got teary. She did not cry, she turned to her mom and asked if they could take it out of her arm – just for a little bit, Mommy – because, in her words, “I just want to color my duck.” That, my friends, is inspirational. I thought that I would never be able to live with myself if I let my cancer beat me down. How can anyone call me strong when there are super-hero toddlers as strong as this young lady?

Life with cancer is exactly like life without it: some days you feel good and some days you don’t, sometimes you feel like doing stuff and other times you don’t, and life can always end in the blink of an eye, but the way you look at life can make you live forever. It’s an inspiration when a person hits a road block that seems impossible to overcome while on their path in life, and that person at least makes an effort. Success and failure, victory and defeat, life and death lay in the hands of the gods, so let us take pride in the effort. It doesn’t matter the outcome, but only that we try. I learned this from an aunt of mine who was and always will be truly inspirational.

Whatever the struggle, whatever the task, inspiration is born of the people who have an affinity for succeeding no matter the task. Inspiration arises from the simplistic decision to be resolute and to strive to achieve the task. Bells and whistles are not necessary. The child on the fifth floor of the burning building that one runs to save is not what makes the man inspirational; rather, he is an inspiration because of the quiet manner in which he saw the path he had to take and was steadfast in his pursuit of the goal, not allowing the obstacles that tried to keep him from completing his goal to deter him from making the attempt. The struggle of cancer, like the struggle in every circumstance of life, is a matter of knowing where you are, visualizing where you want to be, evaluating what the necessary steps are to travel that pathway, and then completing the steps. Or more simply put:

“Begin at the beginning and go on ‘til you come to the end; then stop.” –Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland

We will always lose every battle that we think we will lose; there is no way around that. I think the point of this post, and the message to be taken in life, is simple, elementary even: Just keep coloring the duck, and make it look however you want it to look.

“Do or do not… there is no try.” – Yoda, Star Wars