When Do You Have the Time?

I received an email from a dear aunt the other day, who had just spent much time catching up on my blog. "Calin," she wrote to me, "How do you have time for cancer with all the travel you're doing?"

Excellent question.

I mean, it really got me thinking about the nature of busy-ness in our lives, and what we make time for, and what we don't, and how much that really affects the experiences and events that we take part in. Cancer certainly has not presented itself as a choice—something that I can consider and, then, when I've had a few days to think about it, either accept it or reject it—it does seem to have been thrust upon me. But maybe there's a level of life and living that I haven't figured out how to reach yet (and maybe can't in human form), where all experiences are choices? Maybe, in fact, I already have chosen cancer, and travel, and the only reason I have time for both is that I've really planned it that way.

Back in the metalife, before I incarnated here to this base reality of incomparable physical experiences (if you believe in such things)—joys and vertigos and agonies, exhaustion and supreme, utter peace and energy and vigor, maybe I chose cancer and travel as the two best ways to live my life to its extremes. And so I have time, because there is time. There's always time.

But then again, sometimes there's time because I refuse to let an schedule—self-imposed or externally-imposed—completely dictate my personal events. For the most part with my travel, I do hold myself to the three-week cycle that my Herceptin schedule has me on . . . but not all the time. For our trip to Kenya next spring, I am going to miss an infusion. And it's not going to kill me. And it's going to allow me to see Giraffes! With their heads in my bedroom window! And the Indian Ocean and mangrove forests! And misty mountains covered with tea plants!

And so, I guess the answer is, I have the time whenever I want it, or whenever I need it. The jigsaw puzzle of my hours might be more complicated than some, with 1,000 pieces instead of 350, or the handmade, Stave version of a puzzle with lots of gaps cut into the intricate connections, just in case the classic approach of things fitting tightly together is somehow unsatisfying.

My life is certainly not unsatisfying.