My future gets delivered in six-month chunks, the cadence of my cancer follow-ups. As the calendar becomes dotted with scans and appointments, the tension rises in me like any climax. So far, most of the time, the news has been bland, and I’m left with more waiting—until the next season of surveillance rolls around.
If I could become cancer-free, I would choose it, of course. It was such a gift to live unencumbered by the vexations of this human body. That future is up to science and, in some ways, fate, a word I use here to mean complexities too subtle and interwoven to tease apart. As such, it feels out of my hands completely, a particularly humbling feeling as a physician so used to “doing something”. Medical training does little to prepare us for this other side of the white coat.
It isn’t just bad news. These boluses of days and weeks in which I can live freed from treatment or surgery are sweeter than any that came before. The sense of beauty is so profound, even with its fears and anxieties, that a friend of mine living with cancer of her own agreed that if becoming free of it meant losing the perspective it gave her, she would rather keep it.
Can’t say I’m as brave as her, but I’m trying. When I was new to the patient position—and the see-saw of emotion it commanded—I called my meditation teacher Shinzen. He listened patiently and said, finally, in his Spock-like, algorithmic way, “While I’m prepared for the answer to be otherwise in your instance, to this point, for every one of my students with news like yours, it has been a positive experience.”
Positive? I could scarcely believe it, and on my most fretful days, I would deny this. On the other ones, though, when the snow is blowing in circles and a perfect flake lands in my lap, or I return from the bathroom to a table full of friends laughing, their faces creased with years of smiles, I know exactly what he means: this is the most beautiful future yet.
If I could describe the change in my view as a person and meditator, it would be as if someone turned up the colour, and everything is more vivid for it. The change in my experience is more subtle, harder to qualify. I do however notice one thing: anger has no home in me anymore. It arrives at times—of course, I am human, riven with samskaras—but it never stays. In its place, more love than I thought possible. It is so precious, this one life that caught us like that dervish of snow, spinning us around our one true heart.
If the impenetrability of the future makes you anxious too, it’s not surprising. Hormonally, it is the exact same recipe as excitement, and biochemically, you could never tell the two apart. In the humming cylinder of a CT scanner, waiting for bad news, or about to accept the award for “artist of the year”— the same cascade. As we learn to sit with it, this profound unknowability, and understand the provocations of our overactive human mind, we come to see our nature and what we are capable of: anything.
This year, amidst all my particular medical tension and release, I reached a certain type of anniversary: I have been a doctor longer than not. Twenty-five years in emergency rooms with people on their worst day, reassuring them, helping them know that even though the future is unpredictable and unknowable, I can say something true about it: you will be cared for. That’s a future I can believe in.
In that, there is great cause for excitement. As I pondered this essay, I thought I would build a case about how profound our successes as human beings have been in my lifetime—for instance, halving poverty and hunger years faster than we thought possible, giving people with HIV long and healthy lives – and use that trend to make predictions about conflict and climate change, but I’ll make it another time. For now, I’ll simply remind us that who we are becoming, and the world we will build to reflect the love we have been shown, sits somewhere in the future too—beyond birthdays and death days. This month, guided by my homies at the CEC, we will practice holding tight with these feelings of anticipation so our next move toward the more perfect future will be even truer.
And if you want to DANCE your way there, I made a soundtrack for you, as is my yearly habit. Happy new day. J.
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