On trusting your training
A couple of days ago, I went surfing for the first time in more than a year. My cancerversary was last week, my initial diagnosis of Stage III that led to Stage IV in a matter of months, and I've found myself since the beginning of the year fastidiously comparing now to then. This time last year, I was in Mexico for my board meeting. This time last year, I was celebrating with friends. This time last year, we threw flowers into the ocean to cast wishes and give me strength for the journey ahead. This time last year, my world shook, crumbling all that I thought to be true to the ground.
As I find myself a year apart, I still feel the reverberations as the last of everything in my life that isn't true to my core continues to fall to the ground. It's the end of the Year of the Snake, the final shedding. Somewhat ironically, I woke up to an earthquake while in Mexico City on the second day of this year. As my phone sounded with an alarm, the streets filled with the commotion of people huddling to the center for safety, cars swaying around us as the earth moved beneath our feet, I found myself oddly calm in a practiced surrender.
I thought of the Kipling poem I had pinned to my mirror in boarding school.
If you can keep your head about you, while all others are losing theirs…
How do you hold your center when the earth falls around you? How do you keep your head up when you don't know what the future holds? Standing in the street in Mexico, the ground rolling beneath me, I already knew the answer. I had been there before, and I had done this before. The challenge has a different face, a different nature, but my reaction is the same.
Yesterday, at a Chinese New Year celebration, I painted my wish for the year, 養, Nourish. I thought about wishing for health, for love, for community, for family, for success, but I realized that the output is irrelevant. What matters more are the conditions you create for anything to exist. Call it scaffolding, call it practice or training, what is the invisible framework that you can fall back on when there is nothing visible left to hold you?
My next round of scans is coming up, and in this time, I find myself collecting moments to sustain me. If I don't make it through this next round of treatments, what have I left undone? It's a heavy burden, debilitatingly so. But the thrill of living keeps me going. I squeeze my energy out like the last bit of toothpaste in the tube.
If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew To serve your turn long after they are gone, And so hold on when there is nothing in you Except the Will which says to them: 'Hold on!'
Over the last year, the dream of being back on a board, mind and body consumed by the ocean waves, kept me going. As I struggled to stand up and walk for part of this year, my faith that I would return never wavered. And there is nothing, my wrecked digestion, the dwindling sensation in my feet from neuropathy, and the fact that I wasn't particularly good to begin with, that could keep me from it.
As I paddled back into the surf, I thought about trusting your training. When I was a competitive rower, this moment came before races when I stepped in and strapped my feet into the boat. The second you are in, you are the boat, you are the wave. Your body knows what to do. There is no space for your mind to change your plan as the water's momentum drives you forward. Any semblance of control dissolves as the state shifts towards movement.
Your goal in that moment is to stay out of the way. To let yourself be carried by the momentum without trying to exert control. The dancer dissolves into the dance. The surfer into the ocean. In the waves, I surrender myself to a higher being. My oars, my board, and my body focus on following the lead.
When you turn the board around, you are locked in. Paddle, paddle, paddle, hard paddle, hard paddle, hard paddle, the board takes on the energy of the wave, and for a moment, you are not a cancer patient, you are not a woman comparing this year to last. The water lifts you up, and there is nothing underneath you that hasn't held you before.
And in the exhilaration of that moment, I think:
Yours is the earth, and everything that's in it, And—which is more—you'll be a Man, my son!
