“Life is a teacher of universal truths. To the wise, life is not a series of events to be controlled. Life is a way of walking through the world whole and holy.”

I recently read this quote by Joan Chittister in the book, “How We Learn to be Brave: Decisive Moments in Life and Faith” by Mariann Edgar Budde. The words resonated with me as I anticipate the beginning of “scan season”, the time when medical scans update the status of my health. From May to July, I experience multiple scans to assess my heart deformity and the current state of cancer in my body. I always approach this time with a gnawing sense of trepidation. Mixed in with that is a rather illogical feeling of performance anxiety. Have a done enough to keep my heart from progressing or to keep my body’s status with cancer stable? I do not mean to imply that my efforts at medication compliance, healthy nutrition, sufficient hydration, and exercise are meaningless. But this performance anxiety is illogical because it implies I have control. And I do not. At most, I have influence.

“To the wise, life is not a series of events to be controlled.” I clearly do not have this wisdom thing nailed down. But I’m working on it. Every year during scan season, I remind myself that while I may not have control over my body, I have control over my relationship with my body. I can be critical of it for all of its perceived failures or I can be kind and compassionate with my body. I clearly remember the first time I saw my abdomen in the mirror after the surgery for kidney cancer. Nine scars, red and swollen streaked across it. I stepped out of the shower and instinctively said out loud to the image in the mirror, “Oh you poor thing.” It was not that I could not see the disfigurement and ugliness of my body. It was that I ran right past the deformity to embrace the beauty of a body that continued to carry my spirit through the world. It was that I could see the physical and emotional suffering in those scars and find a deep well of compassion within me.

This instinctive response to my body after kidney surgery did not match my first view of my mastectomy scar. There was no compassion, but instead a strong streak of disgust and shame. Facing my first experience with cancer, I was vigorously fighting to control my body in any way I could. So how did this relationship with my body evolve in those five years? It came with a daily practice of self-compassion. That’s right, practice. It came with catching the derogatory self talk and trying to change my language to love and acceptance. And in case you think I have perfected this, I have not. I have strengthened it with practice. But I still experience moments where I want my body to do what it was able to do before cancer. And when it doesn’t, I feel frustration, grief, and at times harsh judgement. It takes some intentionality to shift toward a warmer, kinder approach to my body when I am feeling that. This shift is one of the few spaces on my journey with cancer that I do have control. The rest of it, not so much.

So what is my approach to the beginning of scan season? It is to focus my intention on a healthy relationship with my body. It is to remind myself that scans report the reality of my body. They do not create the reality of my body. And it is to remind myself of my heart’s desire, “to walk through the world whole and holy.”

Be well, my dear readers.