The Last Ten 40-by-40 Ideas

So, you know that I've put together my first 30 of my 40-by-40, but what about the last 10?

Well, #31, I'm already doing - Take a Road Trip Across The United States.

As for #32-40, here they are.....!

32. Attend a gravesite ceremony with Katy Chin in New York.

33. Build a Rube Goldberg Machine to light the candles on my 40th birthday.

34. Build a Bottle School with Eli Call and Hug It Forward.

35. Pay off all my medical bills.

36. Build a treehouse with Marlon King.

37. Play a zombie in a film or TV show (tell you a secret: I've wanted to do this ever since I saw MJ's Thriller video).

38. Go ALL OUT on Halloween (i.e., dress up in full costume, complete with makeup).

39. Go to Graceland on my birthday (which also happens to be Elvis' birthday)

40. Dance with Ellen Degeneres.

Life After Lemonade: Stage Four - The Yellow Wood

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,

And sorry I could not travel both

And be one traveler, long I stood

And looked down one as far as I could

To where it bent in the undergrowth;

Then took the other, as just as fair,

And having perhaps the better claim,

Because it was grassy and wanted wear;

Though as for that the passing there

Had worn them really about the same,

And both that morning equally lay

In leaves no step had trodden black.

Oh, I kept the first for another day!

Yet knowing how way leads on to way,

I doubted if I should ever come back.

I shall be telling this with a sigh

Somewhere ages and ages hence:

Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—

I took the one less traveled by,

And that has made all the difference.

- The Road Not Taken, by Robert Frost

Now that you've decided (hopefully) that you're done whining about how you almost didn't make it, now that you've decided that you DO want to be here, and that you're ready to craft this post-disaster life and embrace your survivorship, you must as yourself one last question:what kind of a life do I want to live?

Are you going to live a half-life, like Ricky Bobby, afraid to get back in the car again? Or, do you want to create something that's worth what you went through to save it? Because it's not going to be easy, to craft a life worth living for. It's going to be frigging hard work. But let me tell you: if you do do it, you'll never get to the end of your life and, as Thoreau once said, discover that you did not live.

When I was in my late twenties, all my friends were turning 30. They were whining about getting old, about 30 being some deadline for the end of their youth (it seems so ridiculous, looking back, now that I'm 36). At 27, I had taken up running again and was training for my first marathon, and one of my tenants was training for an Ironman - an insane triathlon that started with a 2.4-mile swim, followed with a 112-mile bike ride, and finished with a 26.2 mile run. She suggested I try a sprint distance triathlon (750 m swim, 20 km bike, 5 km run), and for the second time that year, I imagined what it would be like to do something that I thought might be outside my realm of capability.

Here's the thing: we all have ideas about what we think we're capable of. We tell ourselves stories, or believe the stories other people tell us, about the things we can and can't do, and when Nicole suggested that it was possible for someone like me to do even the shortest of triathlons, it was like a tiny crack suddenly formed in my head. Me? Do a triathlon? "You just ran ten miles last weekend, didn't you?" she asked, and the crack got bigger. Yes, but... "If you can workout for two hours, you can do a triathlon." And you know what I did? I believed her. It was that simple. And the next thing I knew, my assumptions about what I could and couldn't do began to crumble.

I did the tri, and the marathon, and two other events that year, and on my 28th birthday, I thought, "I don't want to hit 30 and be moaning and groaning about what I can't do anymore. I want to be celebrating what I CAN do!" I figured if I ran a 5K every four weeks for the next two years, I could do 26 by my 30th birthday. Added to my 4, that was "30-by-30" - an accomplishment that would not only make turning 30 worth celebrating, it would make turning 30 something worth looking forward to.

Over the next two years, the 5Ks were replaced by other triathlons, trail runs I had never done before, and bike rides in towns I had never been to. I did the Providian Relay three times in a row, the Big Sur Half Marathon, and a Muddy Buddy. I had so much fun in the last two years before I turned 30 that when my 30th birthday finally came, I rang it in like New Year's.

I know I'm only 36, but if there's anything I've learned in my time here thus far, it's that there are only two paths in life: enjoying it, or not enjoying it. As Frost says, the paths look "really about the same," but what differs is your perception - the story you tell yourself about the path you walked. "Somewhere ages and ages hence," you will be thinking of the path you took, and wondering if it should have been different, so take a moment to imagine that place and time, and ask yourself, "What will I want to remember about my life?"

When I first Googled survivor statistics for Stage 3 Triple Negative Breast Cancer, everything I read said I had a 67% chance of still being alive 5 years after my diagnosis. I did the math and realized that would be when I was 39 - about 3 weeks before my 40th birthday, in fact. While most women dread turning 40, I am really looking forward to it, because if I make it to 40, the odds of me living cancer-free for the rest of my life skyrocket - I become part of the general population, with no more risk of getting cancer than anyone else.

Lots of people live their whole lives just waiting to retire, so they can "get busy living." My dad used to talk all the time about what he was going to do when he retired: he wanted to move to Reno, into the house he and my grandparents owned, so they could live with him. He wanted to teach kindergarten at the school across the street, and buy a red Corvette, and plant roses all around the house. He said my sister and I could come visit and stay in the guest room, and we could go skiing anytime we wanted. It wasn't that my father hated his life or his job - he never struck me as an unhappy man, even though I know he must have struggled. It was just that he had all these dreams, that couldn't come true until later.

If you've been reading my blog, you know that my father never got to make any of those dreams come true. He died at 53, of a heart condition he didn't know he had. My grandparents sold the house in Reno and my grandmother died five years later. I didn't go skiing for ten years after my dad died - it was something we always did as a family, and I think a part of me just didn't enjoy it without him. When I finally got back on the slopes, I was just as good a skier, but it wasn't the same.

Why do we save our happiness for later? Why do we put off joy?

I call the last Stage of survivorship The Yellow Wood, because this is where your path will diverge. Don't think about what you can't do because of what you don't have. For once in your life, make a list - not a list of the things you couldn't live without, but of the things you couldn't die without - things you can't bear to miss out on.

When I came back from my First Descents trip, I made a list - my "40-by-40" - forty things I wanted to be able to say I had done, if I didn't make it to my 40th birthday.* It's not that I don't think I will make it; it's just that now, I'm acutely aware that our time here is limited. "Live like you're dying?" Newsflash: we're all dying. No one here gets out alive.

This "40-by-40" list, as simple as it sounds, is just something to keep me going, milestone by milestone, reminding me of the reason why I want to be here - to live the life I fought cancer for (and won). If you want to revel in your survivorship, make your own list. It doesn't matter if it's a Top Ten, a thousand places to see before you die, or a score you want to beat on a video game. Set a goal for something that you *almost* think you can't do, and it will, step-by-step, rebuild your hope about the future (and remember, you have to be somewhat realistic here - not everyone can walk on the moon just because they beat cancer, and setting an unrealistic goal can be a cop-out disguised as a "big dream").

Most men lead lives of quiet desperation - probably because of all those dreams they're forcing themselves to save for later. Don't be afraid to take the path less traveled by - it will make all the difference.

*Regarding not making it to my 40th - I'm not calling my 40-by-40 a "Things To Do Before I Die" List. I prefer to think of it as a "Things To Do While I'm Still Alive" List. ;)

Life After Lemonade: Sidebar - The Ricky Bobby Factor

"Do you want to know why I think you should race again? It's because it's what you love, Ricky. It is who you were born to be. And here you sit, thinking. Well, Ricky Bobby is not a thinker. Ricky Bobby is a driver. He is a doer. And that's what you need to do. You don't need to think. You need to drive. You need speed. You need to go out there, and you need to rev your engine. You need to fire it up. You need to grab a hold of that line between speed and chaos, and you need to wrestle it to the ground like a demon cobra! And then, when the fear rises up in your belly, you use it. And you know that fear is powerful, because it has been there for billions of years. And it is good. And you use it. And you ride it; you ride it like a skeleton horse through the gates of hell, and then you win, Ricky. You WIN! And you don't win for anybody else. You win for you, you know why? Because a man takes what he wants. He takes it all. And you're a man, aren't you? Aren't you?" - Susan to Ricky Bobby, Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby

When I was getting ready to finish chemo last year, I scheduled a job interview with a recruiter. I was 36, had a Green MBA and a diverse resume - four years of managing commercial properties, a year grantwriting for a non-profit and developing an environmental internship program for at-risk youth, two years of running my own businesses - one online and one in my backyard, literally. I had even written a Youth-Driven Green Plan for the City of Richmond - something no one on the planet has done - and on top of all that, I had developed a blog and YouTube Channel that had gotten over 30,000 video views. Still, I had been having trouble finding a job, and thought I'd better bite the bullet and call in some reinforcements.

The meeting did not go well. She was late, hadn't reviewed my resume, asked if I had been looking on craigslist and other "Green" job boards - all of which I was familiar with (did I mention I have an MBA?). She suggested that my trouble was probably due to being out of California for a year, and that I might want to volunteer somewhere locally, to add experience to my resume. Experience to my resume? I wanted to say. I have a degree that less than 500 people in the world have, in the fastest growing field there is.

When I spoke to a friend about the meeting, who recruits in a different industry, he dismissed my conclusion that she was a moron. "April," he said, "I Googled you." Yeah, so? 30,000 hits on my YouTube Channel, a blog with tons of entries on how to survive a tough economy, how to green your business, ways to cultivate resilience. Who wouldn't want to hire me? "Honey," he said gently, "you had cancer. Why would I hire a 36-year old woman who changes jobs every year, especially one with a history of life-threatening disease?" But that's illegal, I said, shell-shocked. "Nope," he said. "It's not illegal if you never get an interview, babe."

All of a sudden, everything I'd done to make it this far - the last ten years of my life - seemed like a huge liability. By taking the road less traveled by, by sharing my cancer struggles and triumphs with the world, by making my very name into a BRAND, I had totally screwed myself.

A few days after my meeting with the recruiter, I was visiting Sports Basement, a locally-owned chain of discounted sporting goods, to get a new pair of running shoes. Everyone was so nice, and the store had such a pleasant atmosphere. I filled out an application, and, two weeks after my chemo was over, they hired me. They hired me even though I wore a baseball cap to work for two months, even though I wasn't done with my treatment (I still had 28 radiation treatments, which had been delayed by another surgery). They even gave me health insurance, despite the fact that I was a cancer survivor, and my coworkers made me laugh and inspired me to get fitter and healthier. For six months, I was happy every single time I came to work. I joked that I felt like the girl who has a "broke-ass" boyfriend she is crazy in love with, who keeps coming back despite the fact that she knows it can't go anywhere.

When I finished treatment, though, things changed. The holiday shopping season came, and with it, reductions in staff but twice as much work. I applied for a promotion, but it went to someone else. I gave them a proposal to green all their stores, at a higher salary, and was told they were only interested in projects that didn't take any extra time or cost any extra money (I wanted to say, "Well, if I specialized in THAT, I certainly wouldn't be working HERE, now, would I?"). The opportunities to "move up quickly" that were referenced when I was hired never materialized, and my two favorite coworkers reduced their hours and eventually quit. I was trying to stay for a year so I could keep my discount, but work was getting more and more frustrating and less and less enjoyable. I found myself wanting to stay at home and work on my book, blog, and videos, rather than drag myself to my "real" job. What happened to the place I couldn't wait to go to in the morning?

If you've seen Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby, you know the story. If you haven't, here it is: Ricky Bobby is a race car driver who is cocky and arrogant. While trying to beat a competitor, he pushes himself too far and gets in a terrible wreck that shakes both his confidence and the confidence of his sponsors. His wife and best friend abandon him, and, broke and alone, he is reduced to living with his mother and delivering pizza on a bike (having had his driver's license revoked as well). Ricky Bobby's estranged father, seeking to rebuild his son's confidence, comes back into his life and pushes him to regain his confidence by learning to "drive with the fear" that debilitated his career, using unorthodox training like putting a live cougar in the car with him. Even when he can drive again, Ricky Bobby remains unsure of himself, telling his former assistant, Susan, that he has put racing professionally behind him. In an impassioned speech (above), Susan tells him he must be the man he was born to be, and Ricky Bobby returns to the track. In the end, he triumphs by refusing to give up, and committing to being the best version of himself.

In looking back at my frustration with my job, I realized, I was an entrepreneur - a dreamer who had jumped off a huge cliff, into an island in the middle of the Pacific, with big dreams of making a difference and changing the world.... and I was delivering pizza. Now, there's nothing wrong with delivering pizza - it's an honest job, and thousands of people do it every day and feed their family or put themselves through college doing it. Working at Sports Basement was, like Ricky Bobby's job, a safe choice in a world that had become very scary. At the time, I needed something reliable, dependable, and not too challenging - something that wouldn't present me with obstacles and fears that would make me feel insecure about my future. I just needed something easy to do and people I could laugh with every day,because I had just been through six months of chemotherapy. But once my treatment was over - once I didn't have to worry about getting sick again - working in an unchallenging, growth-less job felt like a waste of my time, and I could barely stand it.

I asked a friend of mine, who is a professional kayaker, if he knew any guys who went down a rapid the wrong way and almost died... then never paddled anything above a Class III again. "Oh, yeah," he said. "Definitely." How many people do you know, who have had their heart broken and vow to never love again? One of my best friends has been terribly disappointed by love twice, and yet, she is in a wonderful relationship that challenges her every day to have faith in love again. Every day she is still with her boyfriend is, in a small way, an affirmation - that this time won't necessarily be like the last. It takes a tremendous amount of faith and hope to go out on a limb again - believe me, I know - but if you want to survive, you cannot live a constricted life, for fear of it falling apart again. It's akin to depriving your body of oxygen, because you don't want to take a deep breath again.

My solution, for what I call the Ricky Bobby Factor, is the same as the movie's - you have to do what you love, even if that means (ESPECIALLY if that means) learning to "drive with the fear." And yes, you will probably have to get in the car with a cougar. Not a "real live cougar," of course - but something that really and truly scares the crap out of you. It's the only way to hit your "RESET" button - and that button is the key to reclaiming your courage and hope.

What I did - albeit unintentionally - was go on a climbing trip with First Descents, which runs adventure therapy camps for cancer survivors. They started as a kayaking camp, which I think is a perfect metaphor for life after cancer (or any other disaster). When you are kayaking, you are floating on an uncontrollable, unpredictable force of nature - just like life. You cannot control a river - it is going to twist and turn and there is nothing you can do about it but learn to ride the waves - to practice being unafraid of the rises and dips on the ride. You can learn to navigate, to paddle, to float, to rest, and all these skills will make the ride easier and more enjoyable, but once you are in the river, you are in the river, and there is no getting out. When I was climbing, the greatest lesson I learned is that your footing - your grip on the wall - is always more certain than you think. I would take a step and think, "That little crack is not going to hold my weight!" and miraculously, it would. I learned to trust my body, trust my instincts, and have faith in myself. After just a week with First Descents, I felt like I had come back home to myself. I realized that it was because for the first time in months, I had actually BEEN myself - a climber, a dreamer, an adventurer who took big leaps of faith and hung on for dear life when the ride got scary. I laughed, looking in the mirror when I got home, because I finally recognized the person staring back.

Life After Lemonade: Stage Three - To Be, or Not To Be (That Is The Question)

To be, or not to be, that is the question:
Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer
The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,
Or to take arms against a sea of troubles
And by opposing end them. To die—to sleep,
No more; and by a sleep to say we end
The heart-ache and the thousand natural shocks
That flesh is heir to: 'tis a consummation
Devoutly to be wish'd. To die, to sleep;
To sleep, perchance to dream—ay, there's the rub:
For in that sleep of death what dreams may come,
When we have shuffled off this mortal coil,
Must give us pause—there's the respect
That makes calamity of so long life.
For who would bear the whips and scorns of time,
Th'oppressor's wrong, the proud man's contumely,
The pangs of dispriz'd love, the law's delay,
The insolence of office, and the spurns
That patient merit of th'unworthy takes,
When he himself might his quietus make
With a bare bodkin? Who would fardels bear,
To grunt and sweat under a weary life,
But that the dread of something after death,
The undiscovere'd country, from whose bourn
No traveller returns, puzzles the will,
And makes us rather bear those ills we have
Than fly to others that we know not of?
Thus conscience does make cowards of us all,
And thus the native hue of resolution
Is sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought,
And enterprises of great pitch and moment
With this regard their currents turn awry
And lose the name of action.

- Hamlet, William Shakespeare

I post the whole of Hamlet's soliloquy here because there isn't a part I think I could take out without reducing the impact of it. He covers it all: to live, to die; suffering and why we suffer; how easy it is to end it all and why we don't. In a single speech, Shakespeare covers the dilemma of human existence: why do we bother going on, when life can be so hard?

The Third Stage of Survivorship is a serious stage; I'm not going to sugarcoat it. Sometimes, you stumble into it in the midst of your trauma. Most people get to it after, when the pain is over and their body has knit itself together and life is, for all intents and purposes, as it was. The only thing is, you're not as you were, are you? You're not Lance Armstrong, made stronger by cancer, winning Tour de Frances left and right. You're just a twenty-something cyclist, fresh out of chemo, dropped from your team with everyone wondering if you'll ever race again. Even YOU might be wondering if you'll ever race again, though you'd never admit it, for fear of letting everyone down. Your life is probably WORSE than it was before - harder, harsher, and more disappointing, because of what you've been through. Your family and friends are saying things like, "You look great!" in the hopes that you're back to your old self again, but inside, you're wondering if life will ever be worth living again.

That's the question you have to ask yourself in this stage. You don't want to, because you're afraid the answer might be NO. NO, I don't want to be here, because my lover is dead, because my breast is gone, because this FEMA trailer isn't as nice as my house was. NO, you want to say, LIFE IS NOT WORTH LIVING ANYMORE.

It's okay to think this. Believe me, I've thought this. People who go through tragedy think this all the time. Hamlet thought this, and it made him ask himself, "Why go on? Why be here?" But if you want to survive, you must think this, and you must ask yourself the question: do you want to be, or not to be? Because that IS the question.

Here's the rub: if you don't want to be here, you won't be for long. Maybe you'll take up smoking, or drinking, or drugs, and kill yourself slowly. Maybe you'll engage in risky behavior, and drive your car into a ravine or get mugged at gunpoint. Maybe you'll stop exercising and start eating junk and your cancer will come back in ten places and chemo won't work anymore. And you know what? There is no do-over. If you ask yourself the question, and decide you don't want to be here anymore, then change your mind later, it might be too late. So think carefully before you answer. Do you really not want to be here?

Now, I'm not saying that everyone who has a recurrence, or is in the wrong place at the wrong time WANTS to die. That's NOT what this is about at all. What this is about is allowing yourself to realize that whether you like it or not, you are having this conversation with yourself every time life isn't what it used to be. And you DO have a choice; you always have a choice, even if you have a terminal disease, because WE get to choose how we live, even if we don't get to choose how we die. Survivorship is about how you want to live the life you have left. Are you going to live like someone who wants to be here, or someone who doesn't?

The good news is, if you're still here, you're still here. You can tell yourself that maybe someone Up There thinks you still deserve to be here, or that you still have work to do here, or that there are still things in your life left to experience. Tell yourself any story you want - it's your choice. Because if you really think about it, if you look around at your loved ones and the beauty of this world, and all the things you'll miss out on if you leave it, I think you might want to stick around. Who wouldn't? Only someone who really didn't value their life would end it, and if you fought to survive something, there must be a part of you that wanted to live. If you want to live, and you're just afraid to, try to tap into that part of you, that fought so hard to survive. Life is scary, but that doesn't mean it's not worth living. It's not scary all the time, right? Just some of the time? So, if you want to live, if, when you ask yourself if you want to be or not to be, the answer is I want to be here, and the only thing holding you back is a fear that life will always be this hard, remind yourself that nothing lasts forever (just ask Terry Anderson) - except death.

The key is, once you make the decision that you WANT to BE HERE, you need to stop fucking around and LIVE LIKE YOU WANT TO BE HERE. Consider yourself FORTUNATE that you had the strength, courage, luck, whateverto make it through what you made it through in one piece and come out on the other side. Seriously. Think about how many people DON'T GET to make it - the people who picked the wrong seat when they booked their ticket and didn't make it to the emergency exit in time. Think about the literally hundreds of people who, each year, fall through the cracks of an imperfect medical system and are diagnosed too late to save their own lives. You're here and they're not. You're not in survival mode anymore. You survived. So count your (and pardon my French, but this is serious business) fucking blessings.

Once you have thought about it, and made the decision that you want to live, you have to get busy living. Stop acting like you're going somewhere, like death is coming for you or life isn't worth living. Life IS worth living, so make a decision to start acting like it. Then, you'll be ready for Stage Four - The Yellow Wood.

But first, a Sidebar: The Ricky Bobby Factor.

Life After Lemonade: Stage Two - Acknowledging Your Mortality

Before you read this post, watch this video, from Superman II: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IRRFMrzTYpE

The Second Stage of survivorship is what I call "Acknowledging Your Mortality." Really, it should just be called "Acknowledging Mortality," because the face is, no one gets out of here alive.

It's news to most people, that they're mortal. We act like Superman, staring dumbfounded at our own blood. I bleed? Yep, that's right - you bleed. You don't have any insurance against tragedy, against disappointment or unmet expectations or plane crashes. Pile up all the statistics you want - you can still be that one in a million person, and there's nothing you can do about it, because guess what? That's life.

Reckoning with life's unpredictability and uncontrollability is the second stage of survivorship because once you've acknowledged and accepted the loss of something you didn't think you could lose, you have to face the face that you can lose other things. When my mother died, and my father died twelve years later, I thought, "What, has God got a list? (and even worse, if He does, who's next on it?)"

Surviving means acknowledging that you almost died - and that's pretty heavy stuff, kids! Whether your life "flashes before your eyes" or not, you might think differently once it sinks in that this little parentheses we have here is just that - a window - and that there are no do-overs. Before cancer, I was Superman, but the moment my oncologist told me that not only did I have cancer, but that I had to do everything I could to keep it from coming back, I became Clark Kent, sitting in that diner, staring blankly at the blood on my hand. I can bleed?

The strangest part is, when you've survived something, you walk around feeling like Clark Kent in a world of Supermen: people start treating you like you're somehow more vulnerable than they are to the slings and arrows of life. You might want to scream, "You know, you CAN BLEED TOO!" Don't bother. They won't believe you. Another thing that happens is, you might start avoiding things you were never afraid of before, because you no longer harbor this delusion that you're Superman. It could be minor things - like hydrogenated oils or high fructose corn syrup. It might be major things - like, moving too far away from your oncologist or getting on an airplane. Men of Steel don't have to fear injury, but Clark Kent? Clark can bleed. And since you've already bled once, why tempt fate?

What's important to remember, as you reckon with this stage of survivorship is, you're not made of steel, but you're not made of glass either. Life is a terminal disease, yes, but remind yourself: you're not dead yet (cue Monty Python joke)! It's easy to walk around like the other shoe is going to drop, preparing for a future where cancer might come back, where another baby might be miscarried, where someone else can break your heart, but why waste what little life you have left on this earth preparing for disaster to strike again? Disaster may strike; it may not. Chances are, you probably won't see it coming, even if it does. I spent so much time post-treatment asking myself, "What happens if my cancer comes back?" - until a nurse asked me, "What if it doesn't?" I realized that I really was living like I was dying - but that I should be living like I was alive. There's a difference between knowing your life is going to end someday, and living like that end is imminent. So strive for that balance: acknowledge your mortality, but remember: you're still alive.

Life After Lemonade: Stage One - the Grieving Stage

“At this point, I've got the confidence to know that I'll get through anything in my life given I have the motivation to do it, ... If it's an act of survival, we've all got a reason to keep living. It may not be pretty, but surviving is grit and determination in its highest form. I learned that I've got the capacity to do a hell of a lot more than I thought I could if I have the proper motivation.” - Aron Ralston

I've been working on my second book, tentatively titled, "Life After Lemonade," about the period post-disaster: survivorship.

There are a lot of resources out there on how to deal with a diagnosis of cancer, how to treat cancer you already have, and how to get through that treatment. What I had trouble finding, while I was fighting breast cancer, was advice on what do do after I beat it. How do I live, knowing it could come back? Not just HOW do I live, but how do I LIVE, instead of just walking through each day like I'm waiting for the roof to cave in again? Or, even less important than that, how do I do what everyone around me seems to expect me to do: to go back to being the person I was BEFORE cancer - someone I feel like I can never be again, having had it?

I've written before about "recovery" being an attempt to "return to the pre-disease state" - something I think that, at the end of the day, is impossible. You can never go back to being who you were, because 99% of the time, that person didn't believe they could get cancer, could confront death, could be in a life-threatening situation. That person was like most people, believing in a world where if you are good and kind and don't hurt anyone, nothing bad would happen to you. When you are good and kind and you get cancer, or hit by a drunk driver, or your child is abducted, it's like God telling you that all bets are off - life, as it turns out, is a crapshoot.

I have a theory about survivorship, of course - there are four stages. The first, let's call the Grieving Stage. It's the part where you acknowledge what you've lost and grieve for it. Maybe it's a breast, or your sight, or a fiance that you lost. Maybe it's your innocence - your belief in a world where good people don't get hurt. Whatever it is, you have to acknowledge that it's gone and it's probably never coming back. You can talk all you want about the stages of grief, but I prefer Freud's analysis of the process in his seminal work "Mourning and Melancholia" (1917), where he says (and I'm paraphrasing here) that the process of grief is not about wanting something that has been lost to return, but about transforming the feelings you have for the object (be they love, pride, or affection) into feelings that continue to exist, but for something that has been lost.

It took me years to do this with my father, who died when I was 21. Month after month, I was torn apart with sadness that he was gone, unable to look at pictures or revisit memories without revisiting the pain of losing him. I lived a half-life, wanting every day to wake up from what felt like a horrible dream. After reading Freud's essay in one of my classes, I gave myself permission to think of my father as a wonderful part of my life - but a part that was over. I thought, "I can be sad that he is no longer here, or I can be happy that he was at all." It still moves me to this day, to think his time here was cut short, but by learning to love him as something that has been lost, and is not coming back, I am no longer trapped in a world I want to be different.

Grief exists because of our connection to these objects and people we've lost - when they depart, a part of ourselves goes with them. It's narcissistic: grief is a form of reckoning with our own self-preservation. The irony is, the only way we can continue to exist is by letting go of this thing that we think we cannot bear the loss of. You can bear it, trust me. Losing something that is a part of you is not the same as losing yourself, unless you insist on going down with the ship. Imagine Aron Ralston, clinging to his dead limb, unable to let go of that part of himself. He would have lost his life, and not just his arm.

Next in this series, Stage Two: Acknowledging Your Mortality...

The Balance Between Under-Doing it and Over-Doing It

The best advice I've ever gotten came from a Balinese surf instructor. I was in Seminyak to learn how to surf, because I'd heard there are no sharks in Bali (not true, unfortunately - on our last day, the same instructor laughed and said, "Who told you that?!"). Problem was, I kept falling off my board. Halfway through my second lesson, though, he jumped up and ran over to me in the water. "I know why you're falling!" he said excitedly. "You're trying to control the ocean!" Come again? He explained that my knees were locked, with my toes straining downward, gripping the board as a hand would grip a spatula trying to scrape frosting out of a bowl. Subconsciously, I was trying to bend the wave beneath me into something flat, using the surfboard. "Look, you can't control the ocean," he explained. "Trust me, it's too big - don't even try. Instead, try to control your balance on the board. Balance, and you can ride the wave. Understand? Just focus on your balance." I did, and caught the next wave, and the next, and soon I was turning right and left. "I turned!" I shouted to him, 20 yards away. "I TURNED!!" He gave me a big grin and a fist pump. And all I had to do was keep my balance. Who knew?


I've been loving boot camp these days - probably because I've actually been making an effort to reach "muscle failure," lifting until I can't lift any more. My logic is, the human body is designed so that you cannot grow a muscle without breaking down the existing fibers. You literally cannot get stronger without failing. How beautiful is that? Pretty poetic, this meat sack we live in. Fail a little every day and it will only make you stronger. The best part is - the hard part is mental (who isn't afraid to fail?). After that, your body just does its job.

Anyway, what's challenging, I think, is finding that balance between pushing yourself too far and not pushing yourself enough. We have two people in my boot camp that have, as of late, kind of represented the extremes, and reminded me of how tenuous that line can be. One is a girl I love, a runner and athlete who, sadly, ended up pushing herself too far and blowing out her knees. She's in her twenties. She would go to the gym in the middle of the night when she had trouble sleeping, and run ten miles, when I was barely working my way up to a 10K. Our coach warned her she was overdoing it, but she didn't listen. Like my father (who died of runner's heart), she thought more was better. Turns out, more was too much. Before her knees gave out, she was my rabbit - the person who could crack a smile at me in the middle of class and motivate me to squeeze out one more rep to keep up. Now, it breaks my heart that she can't run, and when I do a squat or a mountain climber, I wish I could loan her my legs, imperfect as they are, for 40 seconds because I know it must kill her to have to do back rows instead. Every time I lift a dumbbell with my lymphedema-swollen hand, I look over and wonder if I am playing with fire too. Where is my too much? Will I find it too late?

On the other hand, we have the guy I just want to smack every morning.

Now, I'm not a gym Nazi by any means. What saves me from overdoing it is probably my unwillingness to kill myself for a workout. But the exercises we're doing? Not rocket science. And not that hard, really, unless you max out your weights and reps. Yet, we inevitably have that one guy who doesn't pay attention when our coach is running us through the circuit, then waits for the 30- or 40-second timer to start to figure out what the exercise is. He wastes 10-15 seconds actually getting himself in position (if he ever does - I have seen him SKIP some exercises completely!), finally making a half-assed attempt at five or six reps before dropping the weights and faux stretch while he watches the clock eke out its remaining two seconds. This happens for three or four circuits two to three times a week. I am trying to remember if I have even seen him break a sweat. Class after class, I find myself wanting to go up to him and say, "Why the F are you even here, dude? That girl is killing herself to break a sweat without using her knees and here you are, dicking around like it's friggin' CURVES, flaunting your apathy in her face! I beat CANCER to be fit enough to make it through this circuit and you're not even TRYING!"

*sigh*

Why does this guy bother me? Why am I telling myself this story about who he is and why he does what he does? Why do I even care? Is it because when I first came to boot camp over a year ago, I struggled to lift even the five pound weights I wanted to lift, to do even ten knee pushups? Is it because I know real athletes tragically sidelined by injury (like my friend, the rabbit) who would give ANYTHING for the privilege of squeezing out 30 seconds of squats without pain? Watching him shake out his feet like the 15-second plank he did strained his Achilles makes me want to turn into Jillian from the Biggest Loser and say, "Hey, WINNIE THE POOH. You're not out of shape. You're just too lazy to push yourself. Your refusal to lift something heavy, for fear of actually reaching muscle failure, is the biggest symptom that something is seriously lacking in our society and I'll be DAMNED if I watch an able-bodied person SLACK in the face of more challenged people!"

BUT... balance, I remind myself. Balance is the key. And I don't want to let my concern with the way other people choose to live their lives throw my own compass off. What really matters is how I ride the wave. How I get out into the water and push myself. And if I'm so busy worrying about how other people are doing that I lose my balance, all I'm going to get is water up my nose and my shoulder in a sandbar - and that doesn't help anyone.

#31: Take A Cross Country Road Trip Across the U.S.A.

When I was halfway through graduate school, I had dinner with a close friend and remember uttering the phrase, "I think it's much more insidious than you realize," (probably referring to some corporate greed-driven resource scarcity that had been denied mainstream media coverage), at which point she rolled her eyes and said, "See, now you sound like an eco-wacko." I laughed, nodded, and said, "I should take my act on the road!" The thought of traveling across the country, documenting and uploading corporate crime to expose it, like some character out of a Steven Soderbergh movie, seemed incredibly appealing at the time - and this was years before Twitter and Facebook - and even YouTube had even approached critical mass. It stuck with me, and I began collecting clippings - all the places I wanted to visit, people I wanted to meet - and the story I wanted to tell along the way.

I never got to take the trip, unfortunately - six weeks before I graduated, my sister left her husband, and the ensuing months were spent helping her pick up the pieces and rebuild what was left of her life. Ironically, I would go through a similar Nagasaki-like life reset years later - not because of a failed relationship, but a cancer diagnosis that rocked my world and shook my foundations. Gone were the green dreams, replaced by the pragmatism that comes from realizing the world isn't perfect, and never will be.

Now, with the dust settled in both our lives, and my future yawning before me, I stand at the crossroads in a yellow wood. One path leads to a studio apartment and the bottom rung of Corporate America, where I can start climbing up to Middle Management for the third time in my life. The other path - a path I seem to visit a lot, actually - leads to the unknown. I have an idea now - one that whispers to me these days, of the "key in having a key, and going". It says, "take your act on the road, kid, and see everything you want to see, because you're lucky if you get 100 years here." It says I can always rewrite my resume, always put down a deposit, and always grasp the bottom rung of that ladder, because that rung will be there, waiting for me, for years and years and years, no matter how many times I get out of line, and it always leads to the same place.

But how many times in my life will I be without a partner, without a child or a job or an illness to treat, or any number of things that will keep me tethered to one place ? If I go to my five year checkup at 39 and the doctor says, "I'm sorry, it's not good," what will I want to look back on? What will make me feel like I ate life up like an heirloom tomato in the heat of summer? I can tell you one thing: it isn't going to be three years as a data entry specialist at a real estate investment company, living next to a KMart. That is NOT what I went through six months of chemo for.

This, though - this idea: the "bright altar of the dashboard," as Stephen Dunn put it - quickens my pulse. Scares the crap out of me. And makes me feel, for the first time since I watched my dreams sink to the bottom of the proverbial ocean, like I'm following my bliss again. And is there a truer purpose in life? Does Ricky Bobby belong in suburbia delivering pizzas? I think not.

And so, the adventure begins: #31 in my 40-by-40, coming this October to a town near you: Take A Cross Country Trip Across the U.S.A. Stay tuned for dates, locations, and a timetable for my Next Big Thing. ;)