Loyal To The Bone

My body and I, between miracles and MRI's.

=I wish I could write all this with the clarity and confidence of someone who has it all figured out. To pour it all out in neat and tidy paragraphs, streamlined and structured, with smooth, seamless transitions that bridge all gaps. Alas, that is not how the monkeys and I operate. The best I could do, was to cut it up in chunks and add a few subtitles=

It all started with my physiotherapist. She treats me twice a week for lymphedema (for people who still think this is a cosmetic issue of a “little swelling”, I recommend you read up on it). We talked about being in limbo, about waiting to hear when my next MRI will be (it’s been scheduled now for Friday 23rd of May). Scanxiety is taking over, I wake up with it and go to bed with it. I am both eager and terrified to find out where things stand now. We will know soon.

Until then I am writing about it, but rarely bring it up with friends or family. I am in a quiet retreat. Walking, writing, meditating. Mindful of myself to the core.

At the last lymphedema session we talked about how to strike a balance in all of this. What helps and what hurts me now? I also said:

Why am I still scrambling? I have been here before, in 2011 when I was also told I would die within two years. Why, based on my own miraculous experiences, do I still want facts, knowledge, truth and certainty from medical perspectives?

Here I am, again, caught in between the miraculous and the terminal. Can somebody please make up their mind? Which is it? I keep hovering undecidedly between healing and helplessness. I don’t quite know where to put my faith. Where to take heart, how to have courage. Trapped between my body’s mystery and my oncologist’s limits.

Twilight zone, liminal space or limbo, call it what you will, it is not the space where I want to set up camp. I want to stride through quickly, head held high, and get on with it. With what? Well: life!

I understand, my physiotherapist said. I have no idea what you are going through, I don’t mean that. But I do understand that strange ambiguity, of craving for certainty, wanting to be sure of something, while knowing that nothing is ever certain.

THE HUMAN DESIRE FOR CERTAINTY

I keep circling back to this sentence, which I blurted out a while back, in a note or post, I don’t remember. It could have been one of my last instagram appearances.

“If everything is possible,

then nothing is true.”

(Not to be confused with Charlotte Labee’s “Truth is whatever you as a human choose to believe”, or Trump's “alternative facts”. Those both contain too much delusion).

“If everything is possible, then nothing is true” is the opening line of my third memoir (yes the third one is underway too, even if the second one remains only half written). Revisiting this in the context of craving certainty, it’s a feisty one to wrestle with. I want everything to be possible for me, including health and longevity. But I want to know for sure. Having experienced a miracle before, which ironically manifested after me embracing my pending demise, I can’t welcome death with the same “sagy shaman” and very soulful approach I did last time. Because now I know. Now I know that it is possible to live longer than expected. My miracle has changed my expectations, without fully understanding how the first miracle came about.

How did I do it last time? I changed my diet (no sugar), I changed my media content consumption (a lot of comedy and feel good), cleared out the dead weight from my relationships (sort and sift should be standard setting really), I meditated daily (sometimes 3 hours a day), I immersed myself in nature (tree hugging, bird watching, flower picking) and walked circles around the hunebeds (many, many circles). As if there is a recipe, a method, for sneaking out of a terminal prognosis. I love all the healers in the world, Dispenza, Hay, Dyer, Chopra, Heer, Nobel, all of them, but none of it comes with a guarantee.

Even after miracles, or perhaps especially after them, we long for more solid ground to stand on. I have to admit that even a decade on, I never firmly found my footing again. I faced my mortality once, and accepted it unconditionally. My body, possibly supported by a higher being, answered by healing. Why does this time feel different? Why can’t I fall back into surrender, slip into that of Grace?

Certainty, for me, is less about control and more about orientation. If I don’t know how long I have left, then at least I need to know what to do, where to go. I don’t know. I have a stupid simple plan: Save up, buy a car, drive to Romania, sell the house, BLANK, BLANK, BLANK. I have just started reading Raynor Wynn’s Salt Path again, and she says it so beautifully. The appeal of walking, and walking a specific route, was: It came with a map. Something to show the way.

When life starts “rattling”, we still need a “north.” Facts, test results, scans, research based statistics and prognosis, they're the only kind of roadmap modern medicine can offer. Even if the map turns out to be wrong or incomplete, it gives me a sense of placement in a chaotic world. This isn’t a betrayal of inner wisdom or lived experience. It’s reaching for whatever clarity can come to me through the fog. And the only way out of the fog? Wait for it to lift, or keep putting one foot in front of the other.

Thing is, I want my inner compass to be enough. I don’t want to navigate on the stars, or follow steps someone else has mapped out. That requires: surrender, acceptance, trust. Faith.

This is not necessarily in opposition to wanting a map. It is my relationship with uncertainty, where external guides are just aids, not fixed, or absolutes. The desire for certainty is not a weakness of my faith or intuition, but my basic human instinct to find coherence, both cognitive (what the hell is happening?) and emotional (where do I stand in all this?), and I doubt that need will ever really “go away”.

I can’t rationalise my way out of it. Thinking does not suffice, so I turn to prayer and meditation. But one of the monkeys in my brain is clutching at certainty as if it is the last banana.

THE UNBEARABLE LIGHTNESS OF BEING

Before turning to the French (and others) for comfort, let me first offer the words of a kindred spirit:

“You need to be light in life. Lightness for me is when being profound allows you to fly high.”

The late and great Franca Sozzani is one of the few heroes I have had (the other one is aunty Viv- Vivienne Westwood. Don’t let their fashion fool you). Franca passed away from cancer in 2016 at the age of 66. She did not talk publicly about her own suffering or about death. I don’t know if she did that to spare others, or spare herself. Something shifts significantly in the way people look at you and treat you, when you are terminally ill. Franca created until her dying breath, she stood for many causes. It makes her more of a stoic than an existentialist, but I suspect that in her private moments, she may have pondered on it too. This absurdity of life and the things that we actively seek out and create versus the devastating crap that gets thrown at us, unexpectedly.

You know I love questions (and I don’t ever give you an answer- I am a bit shitty that way).

What does it mean to live authentically in the face of death? How do we make meaning when life offers no inherent guarantees? What does radical freedom and responsibility look like in the liminal space between life and death? Is faith in healing (or in anything, really) a choice, a rebellion, or a necessity to keep going?

How is it all relevant? The relevance isn’t in finding a clear answer, or even in resolving the contradiction. It’s in the act of engaging with the questions themselves while facing the absurdity and unpredictability of my situation.

Existentialism had great thinkers like Camus, Sartre and De Beauvoir grappling with uncertainty as a fundamental condition of human life. Kierkegaard started it. He wrote of the "sickness unto death" as a kind of existential despair rooted in the ambiguity of being. It is not the physical death that is referred to here. It is the despair that comes from not embracing one’s authentic self.

Heidegger sees our existential condition, as determined by when and where we are born, which inevitably shapes who are, or think we are (identity) and the actions, choices, and decisions we base on this. Depending on where in the world the stork dropped you off, you will have a certain level of freedom (for me freedom relates to both external boundaries and inner awareness) to live your life and do your thing. Accepting the “throwness” of our existence, helps us to be more authentic, while aware of what shapes us.

I love reading thoughts like this and I find them faintly reassuring, but it doesn’t stop me from often feeling hurled into an existence that makes no sense to me, at all.

Sartre emphasises the idea of being thrown into a world without inherent meaning, where individuals must create their own purpose, whatever the circumstances. That means I can make anything mean anything I want? (Before you jump up or giggle Labee was right, meaning is not the same as truth).

The concept of "dependent origination" in Buddhism reflects a similar idea, suggesting that all things arise, based on conditions. Dependent origination (Skt: pratityasamutpada, Pali: paticca-samuppada) teaches that everything that exists is conditioned. Everything is dependent on something else, nothing exists in isolation, or has meaning, on its own. This applies to feelings, thoughts as well as objects, to us as individuals and even the entire universe. Experiences and existence are shaped by a web of interdependent factors.

The psychological notion of "situated cognition" suggests that understanding and learning are influenced by context, leading back to the idea of being thrown into specific circumstances that shape our thoughts and actions. Everything I am and know, is relative and interdependent.

FREEDOM TO BELIEVE

In the liminal space between life and death, my limbo, radical freedom is not about doing whatever I want. As a French friend once said: Just because you have cancer doesn’t mean you get to be a bitch. It is not as if suddenly all the rules of the old normal no longer apply, even if I do occasionally use the cancer “get out of jail free” card.

Sartre would say that I am condemned to be free. In this freedom, I get to choose meaning, how to shape my life. It’s not arbitrary, for me. Meaning is less fact and more practice, expressed through my breath, attention, relationships, time. It’s about recognising the inner space where I still have power, agency, freedom of choice in being, even if something else (my body, or the medical system) seems to be holding all the cards. And I am not playing bluff poker. I still have faith.

In Buddhism, faith (shraddha) is not blind belief. It’s trust earned through experience. My inner leaning toward whatever keeps me upright. It’s not certainty. It’s not even optimism. It’s more I will keep walking this path, even in the fog.

If there’s no guaranteed meaning, inherent or achieved through consensus, offered in a manual, then yes, anything can mean anything I want. But that’s not an invitation to nihilism. That is just not in my nature. I accept the invitation to responsibility, and like Franca to create, until the end, and above all: To be light.

SOUL SOUP SWIMMING

My first memoir opens with a poem, containing the line:

We are not the helpless victims of our fates.

Existentialism is very much not what I have been discussing with Mirella, my former end-of-life councillor. We have been considering the idea that we choose our life, our fate, our experiences. For me it is for the benefit of the “soul soup”: the collective consciousness experienced and evolving, also on a single soul level.

I see each human life as sparked by a tiny splinter of a giant source, soul, soup, that we repeatedly return to. Where we contribute based on how we lived our lives, so that the next splinters sparking new life, have those souls off to a slightly better start. Add to this quantum physics and non-linear thinking and that means the soul spark of another living being can also be in you while you are both alive…

(I will give you a moment to wrap your head around this. Take break. Have some soup. Go for a walk. Or listen to this: Tribal Connection)

When I imagine my soul, my audacious, completely delusional, and over ambitious soul, about to take the leap into this ridiculous life, I think, full of awe and compassion:

Are you sure you want to do this?

It is a daring endeavour.

My soul sings, unwaveringly: Nothing to loose and so much to gain…

My soul may know, the rest of me is lagging. I want a manual. I want complete freedom and be told what to do, and exactly what will happen, at the same time.

Longing for a “north” mirrors the human impulse to locate ourselves in a world that doesn’t come with instructions. The desire for certainty is deeply tied to epistemological questions: How do we know what we know? Descartes famously sought indubitable knowledge, reflecting a human craving to escape doubt. I doubt there is such a thing. My metaphor of the map matches this, in a way. Maps represent epistemic stability, a sense that the territory can be known, named, and navigated. Or maybe it is the reassurance that someone else has walked this road before you, and made it to the other end in one piece.

Giving my nutty professor monkey a bit more room to maneuver (so he doesn’t fight the other monkey over the last banana): In Maslow’s “Hierarchy of Needs” (which I didn’t study properly until I started working with kids in Romania), certainty and orientation are connected to safety needs. This is the foundation on which all higher-order needs are built. Without some basic sense of security, physical, emotional, or existential, it’s difficult to function fully.

I think this beautifully frames the challenges of my life, not just in facing cancer but in having grown up without any sense of safety. I had to build my inner foundation surrounded by threats. Now cancer “threatens me from the inside.” Early relationships shape our inner compass. When life becomes uncertain, we often regress to seeking external validation or guidance because our internal security system gets disrupted. Reaching for facts or prognoses isn’t necessarily a loss of trust in myself. Psychologists have identified a trait-like need for definite answers to reduce ambiguity. This drive intensifies under stress or threat. Exactly the kind of conditions we are in when facing illness, upheaval, or crisis.

TRUTH AND KNOWLEDGE

My experiences have transcended prognosis before. It does not give me a “guarantee” it will again, it also doesn’t rule it out. But knowledge, even flawed or provisional, offers a frame for meaning-making. Without it, I am left with not just the unknown, but with the unknowable.

Why is that a much harder burden to carry? I know nothing with any certainty in life. I don’t need Socrates to understand that. My life has done an awesome job in driving that particular point home. I am never right, because I never know (enough).

Having experienced loss in all its facets, I at least know that nothing is certain. Here today, gone tomorrow applies to everything from my stuff (stolen and burnt to the ground), to people I love (death and abandonment), to my ability to bring forth life all the way to, now, my own life. Everything can change in an instant. Security? How, even (especially in this world)? All contracts, on marriages, homes, and jobs, are short, or suspended one-sidedly as swiftly as they were signed. Wars are being waged in all arena’s, nature’s wrath is also more and more prevalent. More than half of us Dutch will have to deal with cancer at some point.

I am ok with ambiguity: Knowing I am chasing an illusion, when I claim I want to know. That I want to be “sure” of anything.

Wanting medical truth doesn’t mean that I am denying the possibility of something greater. It makes me humble and human: A stubborn, resilient, meaning-making creature trying to decipher a system that often wants numbers more than narratives.

I also don’t search for facts or “certainty”, because I believe it uncritically. Whatever shows up next in the shape of a fact, a “certainty”, I am bound to re-interpret it anyway, to however it suits me. Facts are the pallet. I will paint my own picture with it (and as a friend of mine once said: some hues may be missing, but you will mix up new ones…).

It is still like living in mystery, my way, but slightly better informed.

NO EXPLANATION REQUIRED

My challenge lies in not explaining limbo away. I am not saying, I am going to lean back into it either, like a lounge chair, negroni in hand. I want to get the hell out of here. But it takes time. The mean time has meaning too, if I am open to it. I have always relied way too much on the intellectual, rational mind. It is not the right tool for every task. But how to hold space where both truth and uncertainty can breathe together, not as a contradiction but in oneness?

“Knowing” in my case can go both ways: the MRI can show changes in my favour, with cells fading, tumours shrinking. It can show changes that will change the game entirely, not in my favour. If it has grown, I am likely fucked. Or it can have stalled, stayed stagnant. Not budged either way. The MRI result brings information, knowledge, yes. But this will also apply only temporarily. Until it is time for the next scan.

Balance is important. If I have a no growing or slow growing mass, how often do I scan, without going loopy?

These scans are stressful, confrontational. I am not sitting in the waiting room like a Buddhist monk, all calm and zen. Part of me wants to not do them. I would love to ostrich my way through this. I did ask at the sonogram last year for the technician not to comment on what she saw, while I laid back with my eyes closed. This time around I have also not asked to look at any of my scans. I don’t want to see anything on a screen that could determine my “truth”.

But when I wait too long with a scan, I start to create mini moments of paranoia. Everything in my body becomes suspect, from a stomach cramp to reaching the top of the stairs more out of breath than "usual". In that sense a timely scan can be a relief. Good or bad news I will at least know (an illusion of course) where I stand. For a split second, or two. The dance between knowledge and peace, between vigilance and freedom, between being a person and being a patient. The scan is both a threat and refuge. The illusion isn’t worthless. It’s a kind of temporary anchoring.

The scanning interval depends on tumour growth rate (which for now seems uncertain or slow), symptoms (I don’t have any as the pain that landed me in hospital never came back), my emotional well-being (most important) and what my oncologist and I agree on during these planning visits. My oncologist is both protective, meaning he will not subject me to anything unnecessarily, and a realist so I don’t think he will let me walk away with my knapsack and say, see ya later.

I am not dismissing my paranoia. It is valid, understandable and I lovingly allow for it. It’s not just anxiety, it’s my body awareness turned against me. In 2011 I knew cancer was coming. There were symptoms, messages. This time, nothing. And it freaks me out I didn’t know. I thought I had rebuilt the relationship with my body all the way up to a point where we communicated beautifully, lived in sync. But I underestimated how the last year and a half of my life impacted me, my nervous system, my soul. Before I loaded up all remaining beasties, I wanted to die. I had even dreamt I was already dead.

Don’t scan so often you stop living. Don’t scan so rarely you stop sleeping.

I manage by ritualising the scan in a way that makes it meaningful to me. A moment of contemplation and being as close with myself and my body as I can be, unconditionally. Not a moment of helplessness with my fate determined by a giant magnet. I also plan my aftercare. I think in advance of all the things I need surrounding the scan that make me feel safe, comforted. A soft blanket, a few crystals and a bottle of my homemade herbal iced tea. A decent soundtrack for the trip back home.

LOYAL TO THE BONE: MY BODY

Living past my death sentence in 2011 is rather awe-inspiring. I have literally lived in awe of my body for over a decade. I still do. But it also introduces a unique kind of limbo. I know the rules don’t always apply. But I can’t seem to stop wanting to have them (preferably printed, so I can stick them on the fridge), and understand them.

Someone recently said, it must be hard to regain trust when you have been so brutally betrayed by your body again.

No, let’s re-frame that. There may have been miscommunication, but there is no body betrayal. We got our wires crossed, but there is no assignment of blame, not to me not to my body. I don’t regret ditching scans in 2015. I don't feel naive or stupid for having lived the story of a spontaneous remission. Because, fucking hell, I lived.

Besides, I love my body unconditionally. Like mine, her purpose is life. We have each others' backs. Loyal to the bone. Maybe I betrayed her by not giving her the care she needed. Whispers becoming shouts and all that. But she won’t hold it against me. Instead, I know she is doing everything in her power to heal. I want to know her again, ask all the questions and shut up long enough to hear her answers. This is more intriguing to me than calling possible cancer cells a betrayal... it is more about the questions... By living from questions and not conclusions, the door to possibility stays open for us.

We carry so much in our bodies. The accumulation of stories, wounds, expectations (sort and sift, Lee, sort and sift). And when illness comes into play, there is this strange and painful urgency to reckon with all of it. I am trying to make sense of uncertainty not as an abstract idea, but as something lodged in my body. The mass is not just encroaching on my kidneys: It is pressing against my sense of time, purpose, and self.

I have to challenge the language of “body betrayal.” That metaphor can be damaging. I feel it is implying disloyalty, failure, even enmity. It sets up a split: me vs. my body.

But I resist that split. I meet it with the same resistance as when, with the best intentions, someone told me once that I should accept that I “would never be whole again” after the loss of my uterus. I love all of me, but I do not need my uterus to feel, or be, whole. My wholeness does not depend on parts “missing”.

It is the same as me sidestepping the narrative that frames cancer as a fight. I refuse to engage with myself, medicine, or my cells in that context. I understood and appreciated the metaphor my oncologist used to drive home the danger of adenocarcinoma (ironically that one has left me alone since its first appearance in 2011): When it pulls you into the ring a second time, you won’t make it out alive.

I get it, but no. I have cancer. I am not boxing with Mike Tyson.

I am not fighting. I am not at war. I am in relationship.

When I say my body and I have each other’s backs, because we serve the same purpose, that of a healthy, full, loving, meaningful life, I am describing embodied solidarity. Nothing comes between us.

Instead of “betrayal” we can call it Misalignment, where signals are misread, needs unmet, not through neglect or lack of care, but through unawareness, survival, culture. I called it miscommunication, so let’s roll with that one. Communication breakdown, happens where whispers have to become shouts, for the body to be heard. My body was never sabotaging me. She was speaking. Maybe too subtly at first. Maybe through a language I thought I had learned, but had become deaf to. And let’s take leaf out of the book of another ally, Gabor Mate. Compassionate Inquiry: Do not ask “What did I do wrong?” (or what is wrong with you), but instead say “What might we have missed, together? What might we listen for now?”

In 2014 I started meditating with one very specific meditation. I listened to Deepak Chopra’s healing meditations every day, sometimes more than once. He references a line from the course of miracles that became like a mantra to me: Every decision I make is a choice between a grievance and a miracle. Beyond all my grievances, resentments and regrets, I choose the miracle. In the next part of the guided meditation he introduces the principles of "Sat Chit Ananda" (Sanskrit: सच्चिदानन्द), a phrase from Vedantic philosophy that expresses the nature of the true Self or ultimate reality, Brahman (infinite, formless, eternal ground of being). It translates roughly as:

• Sat truth, existence, being

• Chit consciousness, awareness, knowing

• Ananda bliss, deep joy, peace

Together: Truth–Knowingness–Bliss.

This isn't "knowing" as in facts or answers. It's being in a state of knowingness, a resting in awareness itself, where the Self is not separate from the knowing or the bliss. It's the kind of knowing that arises not from intellect but from presence. You can’t grasp it, you can only rest in it. I am occasionally blessed with it, but have always found it near impossible to explain. I said it as:

"I embrace the knowingness without knowing even what that known is..."

That’s the paradox that mystics and contemplatives across traditions speak of. The way you can feel known by something that has no name, and that you in turn can "know" without understanding it. It’s the deep yes that doesn’t explain, or needs to be explained, it just is. Being one with this, is the ultimate peace I have experienced (the first time it happened was the day after receiving my terminal diagnosis-my soul stepped in and took over).

I often repeat it in the shower or bath. I can allow for it better when I am in a place of release, vulnerability, water flowing like time and memory, clearing my meridians, washing off grime and stench (like in Luna after my crisis). My mind is always reaching out, but when instead of answers, I touch presence, I experience relief, wholeness, gratitude. That’s healing, in its most essential form.

Even in the uncertainty I face, or maybe because of it, I am experiencing what the yogis would call a thinning of the veil. Letting go of illusions, or accepting illusions for what they are without clinging to them. The state of grace where what’s essential becomes visible, if only for a flicker. Love, kindness, bliss, gratitude and forgiveness, not as concepts for the ratio or intellect, but as qualities of being, for body, mind and soul.

THERE IS NO OUTSIDE

I am also pushing back on the old idea that disease is an external invader. My brother did joke, lovingly, and I did laugh, when the four biopsies came up short of an answer: See, I told you, it’s aliens.

I know this will be different for people whose illness, cancer or otherwise, has been caused by toxicity, radiation or other external factors. My cancer does not have that cause, according to my doctors. Having developed multiple cancers at a relatively young age (this all started when I was 32) they think it is down to DNA. I was likely born with a dodgy blueprint. Emotional exhaustion, stress, and survival will have triggered it.

I am recognising that cancer, however destructive rogue cells can be, is a malfunction from within. Not me causing it, but me also not separate from it. This is not blame. It’s interbeing.

“I am also not a separate entity that can blame the body.”

This is Buddhist-adjacent, maybe, or deeply ecological: I am of this body, and this body is of me. And even illness becomes part of the conversation, not the enemy. I can take responsibility, hold myself accountable, without assigning blame. Without judgement, rejection, or separation.

My body is not just of flesh and bone, a vessel that houses my mind, my being. We are co-creators of this life.

Be gentle, is all I am saying. I am not demanding my body be perfect. I am standing beside her as an ally. We are wounded, maybe, but forever devoted.

And that, ironically, makes me feel very alive, in a way other people may never quite allow themselves to be. I am consciously honouring the body, working on our relationship daily. I kiss my own hand and tell my body I love her. When I shower and wash I ask: What do you need? Before sleep in bed, I name all my body parts, organs, tissue, senses, and say thank you. Instead of getting pissed off with it. I have anger, rage even, but I choose to direct that away from my body: She is not a target.

Time With a Possible Deadline

Yesterday, walking home through the lane and past the white peacocks, I thought: Maybe there is nothing to know. Maybe, until recently, I have just been very very lucky that cancer didn’t kill me sooner. Just enjoy what I have, while it is here…

Everyone dies and nobody knows when. We just assume we will grow old. But you can break your neck falling off a kitchen step or a piano can fall on your head. There are about a million absurd ways to, unexpectedly die. Bee sting or bear attack (to keep in with the theme of having lived in Transylvania for so long).

To pretend to live forever helps too. It is what Mirella told me when I was paralysed with fear of time running out and all the monkeys were fighting over the last banana.

But what does time mean in the face of uncertainty? A friend wanted to set a dinner date in September. I don't know where I will be in september. in Holland or Romania. Alive or dead.This is where philosophy isn’t abstract anymore. It burns a hole in my heart, my hands, my calendar. I am holding two truths: Death is always possible. Life is still being lived.

How do I plan a life, meals, visits, routines, under the sword that might fall at any time?

When you’re given the whisper (or shout) of a deadline, all time changes. The near future becomes sharper. Everything feels more real. Coffee, touch, sunrise, dust in a sunbeam.

The far future becomes too abstract, even absurd. September? Who knows. It feels like being invited to Narnia without knowing which cupboard gets me there. But here’s the strange grace: This is always true, for everyone. I have just been forced to see it. Most people walk through life thinking time is linear, generous, guaranteed. I know better. Not pleasant but if there is no way out I may as well walk through head held high.

I am an infinite being making a temporary appearance and cancer made me fall out of the suspension of disbelief that still carries most people through the day.

Let me borrow some small wisdoms from Stoicism:

"You could leave life right now. Let that determine what you do and say and think."

– Marcus Aurelius

Time, under this view, is for clarity. For intentionality. Don’t waste it. But don’t hoard it either.

I call my life the advanced class in detachment, so from Buddhism:

"You only lose what you cling to."

Time is an illusion, a flowing river you can’t grasp. The moment is all you truly have. You can make a September plan without needing to be there. You just show up to now, and the next now, and the next.

Live each day not because it might be your last, but because it’s the only reality you have. This moment (yes Eckhart Tolle and the power of now still resonate too).

Last but not least, let me seat a French philosopher next to an American actor:

Life is absurd so let’s eat dead bird.

Robert Downey Jr. nailed it in “Home For The Holidays”. Life is absurd. But rebellion is continuing to live anyway, without having to appeal to false hope. I name the ridiculousness, the bear attacks, pianos, mystery mass, with intentional ease, as I still decide: “I will eat. I will write. I will laugh. I will plan a dinner with friends.”

Not because I know I'll make it, but because it matters to say yes to life while I still can.