The Morning After

Today was a day for taking in the beauty of Spring. How is it that yesterday, I barely noticed the little green shoots poking their noses through the frozen turf, and today there is a riot of color everywhere - not just the crocuses, daffodils, and hyacinths, but the flowering trees! Every imaginable color - the gentle purple of ornamental plum trees, the swirls of white and pink of the tulip trees, the glorious yellow skirts of the forsythia, the bridal white of the crabapples.

This was no day for gulping breakfast while driving to work, battling traffic. No, today I took the back country route, found a perfect pullover spot with a breathtaking view of the mountains, and climbed out of the stuffy car to slowly savor my ginger green tea and nibble a hot blueberry scone.

Thin wisps of fog still languished about the meadows, and the birds were amazingly vocal - robins and phoebes especially. A shy cardinal couple fluttered nearby, dashing here and there with bits of twigs and grass. Several bunnies quietly grazed, keeping one eye on me, just in case.

The warm mug in my hands warded off the morning chill and I held the golden liquid in my mouth, taking comfort like a baby its mother's warm milk. Sun and cloud shadow played in the grass and a fairy-wing breeze kissed my cheek. I refused to think of the upcoming day, its hectic pace, its stresses, its emergencies. This moment needed to be had, to be lived to the full.

Americans are so bent on hurrying life, always waiting for some future event, never fully experiencing today. We have the strange obsession of wanting to be remembered after we are gone, of enjoying some sort of immortality at least of memory. We want to be Bach who was not fully appreciated in life but is rediscovered, valued, and famous to each succeeding generation. We know that we will be "discovered" for the gems that we really are, that our life has mattered. Yet we engage in activities that work so contrary to that.

We are ants, scurrying about bearing some bit or chunk, driven by our need to succeed, our insatiable desire to have more, bent upon pleasing our selfish desires, hating our jobs, forcing ourselves to run ragged on the treadmill of life, believing that the impact of our work in placing this hubris somewhere will have galactic importance. So we embrace out past while working for our future, but never live today. Never really see the beauty around us or know our fellow travelers.

If I have learned one thing from having cancer, it is to live today. Yesterday was not so great. Tomorrow may never come. But I have TODAY. And I will take it slowly because it disappears so fast without help. Every minute will count. Every experience will be felt. Every nuance noticed. Every opportunity to really see, to hear, to touch taken.

I had forgotten some of that since last I had to face cancer. It is too bad I have not made more of the last 2 years. But I had today. And I will have tomorrow, and the day after that. I will not waste them.