Type A, Meet Roses

The last week, I’ve been struck by how beautiful it has been to drive home surrounded by the bright gold, burnt orange, and dark red colors of fall. It has made me pause to think that it’s been too long since I took the time to look around me and enjoy what I see. Case in point: It’s been nearly two months since I started writing this new post. At that time, I was sitting on my patio enjoying the still warm temperatures of summer and watching a sunset that seemed to go on forever. I wrote down the description for fear of forgetting the image: “The sky was, at first, full of light blue and pink swirls, like cotton candy you would buy at a carnival. Then it became brushed with coral and lavender before hitting the horizon and turning burnt orange and deep purple.” The topic of that post was going to be how my illness had made me “stop to smell the roses.”  Well, apparently not quite.

With my school semester in full swing, my Type A personality has taken over and I now realize that I will have to make a conscious effort to slow down and savor the things I learned to enjoy during my recovery. To help me with that, I’m writing this at the beach, watching the whitecaps dance along the water and the waves crashing upon the shore.

Being in a car – whether it’s driving through a tunnel of fall colors or parked at the pier – holds you captive in some ways. There is no television, Internet, or tasks staring at you to take you away from what you’re looking at and collecting your thoughts. It’s much like my recovery held my captive. I was limited in what I could do and where I could go; all I had was time — time I used for pondering the purpose of life and appreciating its beauty, and that was a true gift. The time I took for reflection taught me a lot – about me, about life, about my place in the world. It’s much harder to do that when your life returns to normal (or at least, in my case, the “new” normal). Reflection is just as important now as it was then, however, so in the midst of hectic daily routines, I realize it is important to pause and appreciate the blessings of life and be thankful for them. My cancer journey that began almost a year ago seems so far away now; it’s easy for me not to think about it. However, I don’t want to not think about it. I don’t want to forget the things I learned in the past year and I certainly don’t want to take them for granted. Hopefully, now that I’ve committed these thoughts to paper, I will commit them to practice.

(A fitting ending: As I was getting ready to leave the beach after writing this, I realized I had left my headlights on the entire time, draining my battery. Now I have to stay here for another 90 minutes waiting on AAA with nothing to do but appreciate my surroundings. God works in mysterious ways!)

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