Spring Cleaning

Every spring I seem to experience a slump. I don’t know how else to describe it. Cocooning maybe.  I travel a ton for work, and to visit friends and family around the country, and it is usually following a long spate of travel that I come home, have some down time, and feel the strong urge to wear yoga pants all day and not leave the house. This usually looks like hours of watching old episodes of a favorite tv show, or reading the stack of books piled next to my bed. Sometimes I even manifest an illness to give me an excuse to lay around all day. I don’t want to see friends or talk on the phone. I don’t want to cook. I want to eat ice cream and take long baths.

For most of May, I have been in full-on slump mode. A bad cold kept me in bed for much of a recent weekend, and though I rallied to get those things done that needed to be, including a trip to Vegas to speak to young adult cancer survivors, and some pressing work and writing projects, I have also spent long hours on the sofa playing solitaire on my phone while watching television. I saw two movies in one week, and did a lot of laundry and organizing. These are all clearly avoidance tactics.

My book deadline is looming, and as this is my third draft, I am feeling a fair amount of pressure to get it right this time, and a bit overwhelmed by what it will entail to do that. I should be writing, and I guess technically I am (though this isn’t my book), but I’m slumping instead. I have forced myself to do a bit of clean-up editing and some outlining of the last three chapters, but it’s not the productive chapter a day schedule that I managed when I was in Hawaii a month ago.

It is so rare for me to have two weekends in one month not only in town, but with little on the calendar, and I should be making the most of them. Here’s the thing. . . maybe I am. Maybe slumping is what I need right now to re-energize. Maybe indulging my laziness during some rare downtime shouldn’t produce guilt, but relaxation instead. Maybe I need some mindless activity for a while so I can focus and write later.

My chiropractor was adjusting me this week and he did some energy clearing as well, which he has never really done before. I’m not sure what prompted it, but one of the things he cleared was around this very issue. He asked me to repeat the following phrase over and over again while he did some work, until he felt it was cleared: “I am a good person, and I deserve some time for myself.”

The first time I could barely say it because I was choked up, crying with the realization that I really always feel as if I need to be productive in some way. This has always been true for me, but it has become a more pressing feeling since I began working for myself. When I had a job, I could often leave work at work and enjoy my time away including weekends, but now it sometimes feels as I am never off. The pressure I put on myself to do more, write more, read more, know more and produce more is always there.

Maybe that’s why spring cleaning exists. We clean our homes to get ready for summer, and we should clean out old, limiting beliefs as well. I AM a good person, and I DO deserve some time for myself, even when a book deadline is looming, a new business is being started, and a six month consulting contract is drawing to a close making a new source of income somewhat pressing. If I don’t take time for me, I will be useless to complete any of those other items as well.

Single

During this month associated with Black History and also love, many of us are still observing February 14 as “Singles Awareness Day.” In a workshop just over a year ago I asked the participants what “single” meant to them. The answers were: loser, alone, lonely and other similar words and phrases. I don’t think this is uncommon. I bought a book once titled: If I’m So Great, Why Am I Still Single? Even though more and more of us are staying single longer or becoming single again, there is still often a negative connotation to that word.

I have written before about Dean Ornish’s book Love & Survival and the role that social connection plays in our health and well-being. This post also noted that while the rise of social media has connected us with more people, the connections are not as deep or meaningful as they are face to face. Recently, I have had the opportunity to revise my thinking on this issue somewhat as I have formed a significant connection with someone who lives on another continent. While we only talk every few weeks by Skype, we have become quite close, and discovered we have a great deal in common in the way we view the world.

Social connection, and indeed love, can take many forms, and though more and more of us are choosing to live on our own, that doesn’t mean we lack community.

In fact, 50% of American adults are single and 31 million (1 in 7) of us live alone, according to the book Going Solo: The Extraordinary Rise and Surprising Appeal of Living Alone. People who live alone make up 28 percent of all U.S. households, making them more common even that those containing a nuclear family. This book suggests that while more of us live alone, we also tend to be more socially engaged outside the home than those with families.

There are even some activists such as Bella DePaulo, PhD, writing about how singles are “stereotyped, stigmatized and ignored, and still live happily ever after.” Her book Singled Out details the ways in which singles are discriminated against in our society (the single supplement on many trips and special event pricing for couples being two examples), the stereotypes we face and the fact that we are often labeled as selfish. She suggests that “family values” have been bastardized to leave out the vast majority of us who are raising kids as single parents, living alone or even part of same sex couples. The graphic indicates the extent of the tax discrimination singles face. I recently noticed this myself as I really scrutinized how much of my salary I never see with my 25% tax rate. It is staggering.

I believe singles have also stigmatized themselves, feeling, as the book title in the first paragraph suggests, that something must be wrong with us or we would indeed be coupled. For single cancer survivors, that stigma can be doubly or triply painful as infertility issues, scars and other body image issues, and the specter of illness and fear of recurrence all combine to make us wonder who will possibly love us NOW? We believe our past illness makes us somehow unworthy or undeserving of love, and sometimes wallow in self-pity, which does actually make us less desirable.

The truth is that all of us are whole and complete and worthy of love no matter what we have dealt with in our past. We all have something to offer, and a beautiful spirit to share with others, even if we are missing a breast, ovaries, a testicle or have physical and emotional scars from the experience of life and illness. It is truly only our own limitations that hold us back, and keep us from sharing the love in our hearts.

A Course in Miracles states that there are only two ways to be in the world – living in fear, or living in love. We are often afraid of allowing ourselves to be vulnerable and share our love because we fear it won’t be returned or we will appear foolish. We hold back for fear the other person doesn’t feel the same way, or might not react the way we want them to. I am learning that the latter doesn’t matter nearly as much as I have thought in the past, and that no matter what, there is never anything wrong with sharing the way you feel with another person. It is indeed all that really matters.

We have all heard that love is the most important thing in life, and for those of us who don’t have romantic love at the moment, we have often made it mean that we are somehow lacking THE MOST IMPORTANT THING. It’s not true. We all have love in some form, and while most of us long to be loved by that one special person, it doesn’t diminish the love “that actually is all around us,” to paraphrase a favorite movie (Love Actually).

People in my life regularly say, “I love you,” to me. This is indeed a miracle, because it was only when I could allow myself to hear it and receive it that it began to happen with more frequency. At the same time, it is the most natural thing in the world to tell the people we love how we feel about them, and be so thrilled to hear it in return. What could possibly be bad about saying, “I love you?”

Who can you say “I love you” to?

What keeps you from feeling worthy of having love in your life?

What do you love the most about you?

I Don't Have Time for Cancer

Perhaps the most common reaction when faced with a cancer diagnosis is fear for your life, and I certainly had that, at least initially. I was lucky though, and was diagnosed early – stage II – so I never really thought that I might die. What bothered me most about cancer was the interruption to my life.

At the time of my diagnosis, I was the CEO of a small company, a whitewater canoe guide and an active volunteer with several different organizations. Just days before Memorial Day in 2006, I was told I had ovarian cancer, and I was immediately annoyed that I would have to be recovering from surgery and starting chemo during the fantastic Colorado summer! I labeled 2006 my “lost summer” as a result.

After four years guiding whitewater canoe trips on western rivers, I had just been handed my dream schedule with three trips on river sections I hadn’t done before. I was so looking forward to paddling the Dolores with its excellent rapids, the Colorado River above Moab and the famed five-day stretch of the Green River into Canyonlands National Park in Utah. I had never gotten that great a canoe schedule before, and I haven’t since. The only trip I got to do that summer was the guide trip three weeks before I was diagnosed. I still haven’t paddled the Dolores either!

As if that weren’t bad enough, I had just booked a trip to Alaska for the week after Memorial Day. Plane tickets had been purchased and reservations made for an adventure in Juneau three years in the making. It ended up being my one-year cancerversary celebration the following summer instead! I had been scheduled to present at two conferences, and had reservations at Mesa Verde – still one of the few national parks in the region I haven’t yet made it to.

I recognize my good fortune at having the luxury of annoyance rather than the fear of death. All things considered, I would take that again any day. But for a busy person like me with barely a free moment in my schedule to begin with, having to give up precious time in the mountains or on the river to sit in a chemo room, or lie on the couch recovering from surgery when the sun was shining was really trying.

I very much resented cancer’s interruption of my life, and the time required to fight the disease. . .time away from work that was important to me, traveling (which I love), and outdoor activities that feed my soul. It also cost me quite a bit of money – about $8,000 all told in doctor co-pays, prescription drugs and insurance deductibles. I would have put that money to such good use on awesome adventures if I hadn’t given it to cancer!

Four years later, summer is nearly over, and I just returned from the canoe trip for single survivors that I have been planning for the past five months. This weekend, 14 people joined us from across the country to embark on a three-day adventure on the Colorado River. Since I have been talking about providing services for the single survivor crowd for three years, this is a BIG deal for me – the start of something new and exciting! It was a big deal for them too. The trip was so rewarding and fun for us all. Here are just a few of the comments from the weekend:

“Thanks for four of the best days of my life. It’s been a LONG time since I’ve felt joy and at peace, and this weekend I felt both. Also, I feel hopeful again and inspired to get out there and really live. Thank you SOOO much!”

“I just wanted to say thank you for this weekend. It was something I really needed and came at the right time. I’m sure everyone on the trip had the best time of their lives, and you touched more lives than you can imagine - not just those attending, but those who are their friends, their family… etc. It’s quite amazing to see the change in people and you were the catalyst for that change. It was an honor to be a part of this event and I can’t thank you enough….”

The response has been tremendous, and we have a great database of people who are interested in future activities, even if three days camping on the river isn’t exactly their cup of tea or their schedule wouldn’t allow then to participate this time. We raised enough money to cover trip expenses above and beyond those generous organizations like Centennial Canoe Outfitters and Marmot who donated gear, Greek101 who donated t-shirts, and giving individuals who donated cash or frequent flier miles to provide travel scholarships. We couldn’t have done it without the non-profit sponsorship of Tamika & Friends, a rockstar planning committee, and river guides willing to donate their time and energy. Denver’s 9News did a feature story on the trip two weeks prior that generated local interest and added a few participants to the roster as well.

This entire experience has given me a feeling of profound gratitude for all of the amazing individuals who have contributed to making this trip happen, and created the foundation for a new organization to serve single survivors (Solo Survivors? Looking for a good name for the new venture – if you have ideas, email asinglecell@gmail.com - would like for it to emphasize connection and relationship rather than alone-ness). If you are a single cancer survivor, and would like to be added to the mailing list for future events, please let us know.

Even if you are sick and tired of the hot weather and mosquitoes wherever you are, enjoy these last few weeks of summer. Get outside and do something fun. It will be cold before we know it, so appreciate the season and share it with friends.