Play Hard

Especially When You Don’t Feel It

From the looks I see on people’s faces these days I keep expecting the end of the world to transpire at any moment. They hear about my cancer diagnosis with stricken looks on their faces. The next thing I know they appear to be waiting for me to drop dead.

Well, don’t.

I come from a long line of people who live against the odds. In my childhood my mother’s maiden Irish aunts would drive up from their home to join us for holiday dinners. In between holidays we might drive to their town to see them. One of those aunts was operated on for a dread disease when she was scarcely forty years old in the early 1940’s. When she woke up from anesthesia the doctors told her to go home, quit her job and prepare to die. In those days when the doctors gave such dire news there was no reason to argue. So Mother’s aunt went home. She quit her job at the town bank. She prepared to die. Eventually she did die. She waited to die until almost forty years later after all of her siblings had died. That is how I was able to meet her when I was a very little boy.

I’ve discovered from researching the various lines of my ancestry is that I am scarcely alone in being stubbornly determined to live out my life until the job’s done. Looking back at records from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries I’ve found surprisingly large numbers of ancestors who refused to die until well into their eighties. In comparison I am a mere babe in my early seventies.

You want to fight history and a good genetic code, go nuts. It’s quite clear that I am here for the duration. I was put here on this earth to do a specific job at a specific time in history. This is something I have known my entire life. Yes, I have had a lifetime of illnesses and other physical indignities. So what?

Life goes on.

Whenever an undesired illness or incident has occurred in my life I have had to make a decision. Am I going to let this drag me down? Am I going to permit whatever is the crisis of the moment to make me feel weak and unhappy? Make me miserable and, in turn, cause me to try to make everyone else around me gloomy?

This is an option and, let’s be realistic, one all of us have tried it at some point in time. I can’t point to the day or time, but I finally learned somewhere along the line that I was killing myself this way. If I put the negativity of the moment before family, friends and the world in general, I separate myself from the goodness in all of you. I put myself in a black box and close the lid. That may work for about five seconds of self-pity, but the moment I become aware that no one is paying attention, no one wants to be around me, it’s my opportunity to get over myself.

Who in the name of sanity wants to be around a whiny adult?

Whining adults are enormously unattractive people. That is why I immediately made the decision with this latest diagnosis that it is only a diagnosis. Before I was told that the cancer could be treated and I would be well again, before I was told that it had not spread to other parts of my body, I had already made the decision that there was too much left to do, too many years left to live, to be dragged down by yet another annoying disease.

Besides, I threatened God and Satan with what they would each have to deal with if I were to die now.

They think they know what hell is like? Come see about me, baby.

Ah, the wonders of cursing prayer!

Rather than employ the alternative of allowing myself to be defeated, I did what I have done many times before.

I followed the wise saying “Don’t get mad. Get even.”

If you haven’t been in what the world tells you is an unsurmountable situation before and it’s facing you now, or if it comes to face you further along in this life, tell God off. Especially if you are an atheist or agnostic. Tell God off. Tell Whoever, Whatever or the Big Nothing that is out there to cut it out.

Stop the pain.

Stop the sadness and the fear.

Stop whatever this horror is that is facing you.

Like me, you are alive at this specific moment in history because you, too, have a life’s job to perform for the good of creation. Believe it or not.

Think for a second. None of us ever have to give into the dreadful dragon we think is in front of us. We can alter our attitude. We can deal with whatever is the mirage of the moment.

Do something different.

Show up for somebody else. Help a person who you don’t know needs the good you have in your life. I’ve known some wonderful people who appear to have everything. They have all the toys in life. However, when they hit a rough patch in their lives what they needed was a smile, a nod, a kind word. No matter what is happening in our lives, we have the unfailing gift of giving away the best of who we are.

Being good to other people is getting even with whatever appears to be dreadful in our lives. Reaching out a hand, saying hello, being a rare kind presence in a world that may feel unkind are all ways of getting even with whatever we think is dragging us down. We are the luckiest people on earth when we show up for other people. Miraculously, we will always receive more than we could ever give away. No matter how the other person reacts.

Rewrite the story of your life with the goodness you wantonly give away.