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Even amongst all the shit it’s possible to have good days.  In fact, shit like Cancer focuses the mind. Never have I seen so much, and done so little (remember my post where I flirted briefly with beginner Buddhism?). Well now I’m living it.

My mother has always been a busy person. A talented and able person.  People would marvel at just what she could do, how much she could take on, and how well she would do it. To them she was a creative powerhouse. Of course to herself she’d never quite done enough. Sound familiar? Well my life was pretty much spent the same way. Running around in the pursuit of something, forever chasing my tail, with each obstacle taking on a seemingly insurmountable form.

Now of course my mum is still all of the things she was, but her illness has forced her to to slow down and take notice.  (Years of telling her it was her time, to sit back and be selfish, and it’ taken a terminal bloody illnesss to make her do it.) Cancer has stopped her in her tracks, and as shit as that is, as devastating and heart breaking, there is also something rather sweet. For the first time (ever?) she is taking a good look around her, drinking it all in, and what she is savouring is frequently surprising, and at times delicious.

Normal life has a habit of taking over, the meaningless usurping the meaningful in a cloud of impenetrable smog.  Perhaps it’s not so much that rays of light can still exist in an otherwise stormy sky, so much as it is the rain itself that makes the luminescent rainbow a possibility.

It really is a shame that it takes something so shit to enforce that kind of clarity. But rather that, than never to feel it at all.