In the shower this morning I felt a lump in my breast. God. It’s so intimate, this writing of the word breast. This unbelievably tender place that is so much of the beingness of being a woman.
Yes. In the shower. Definitely a lump.
And in the ten or so minutes between finding it and writing this now, I have been watching all the possibilities move through me. The first is, what if this is cancer? And with that possibility comes the initial reaction of, really? Do I have to create this in order for me to dive headlong into something that perhaps I’m meant to teach about? Do I have to know the world of cancer up-close and personal? Am I meant to know what it is to jump onto the treadmill of tests and treatments and experience the experience that will surely be draining and defeating and all-consuming. Is this what I must spend my days doing? And what of all the other things that I am on-fire with? What of them? Victimhood? Disempowerment? Sacrifice?
There it is. The possibility of cancer and the expectation of an experience that might possibly come with it, and there, right there, in that expectation, there is a choice. Because who says it has to be that way? Cancer.
And even as I write ‘cancer’ there is an insubstantiality to the word – one that seems to be in its foundation, a insubstantiality upon which have been built the fears and forebodings of what has come to be seen and experienced as a messenger of death. Death, tragedy, children left and lives half-lived.
What if this lump is cancer? What if the stories, the possibilities, the experiences, can be different?
Which they can, can’t they? Because I am being shown, again and again, that my worst fears are without substance. That they are powered and empowered by me. Well, not me exactly, but an old and habitual part of me. And actually, there is something else, something bigger and omnificent that is me and everything else, and it is a something that says, ‘Relax. Be Full. All Is Well’.
So what if cancer isn’t about the familiar pictures of hospitals and chemo and the frantic searches for alternative treatments that might work? What if it’s something else? I don’t know what. I haven’t seen it. But the story must be out there somewhere in the ethers of what is waiting to be created. The new one that tells a tale of these cancers, these bits and pieces of our bodies just waiting to be loved. Loved in ways that they never have been. Because, as long as the body holds shame, as long as some part of our essence believes we are not radiantly beautiful in all that we are, how can these bits and pieces receive the love they believe they don’t deserve? Could it be that cancer is the precursor to knowing and experiencing Love in a whole new way? Fully present. Fully alive. Fully beauty-full. Could this be the story? Could it be one of them? If I am to have experiences and cancer is written into them, these are the kinds of expectations of possibilities that I choose.
Because even those things that seem to have stories written in stone, ‘seem’ is the operative word. It’s not the nothing is ever what it seems, it’s that we can make it whatever we want it to be.
Surely it is no surprise that, this morning, Abraham’s quote led the way:
Expectation indicates the juncture between where you are and where you want to be. Where you want to be is your desire, and where you are is your Set-point or habit of thought. And, somewhere in there, is what we would call expectation. Expectation, whether it is wanted or unwanted, is a powerful point of attraction. Your expectation is always what you believe. But the word expectation does imply more what you are wanting that what you are not wanting. It is a more positive word than it is a negative word. But of course, you could expect negatively – and whatever you expect, you will get!
It is a New year and it’s a happy one because, with so much beauty in the world, how can it be anything else?!