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I'm just me, doing the best I can to move towards life with a few simple (but hard!) practices... (The Keys above)
A good friend of mine wrote these down and gave them to me once. I'm still greatful to her for doing that. After years of work on myself, muddling through the thicket of psychodynamic exploration, I'm still amazed to find that "what happened" doesn't really matter, and that the simplest of practices, such as these, can be the catalyst again and again for profound and lasting change in my life.

Depending on the day, on the mood, on the situation, every one of these is easy and natural, and hard and nearly impossible, but without them, I am never at rest, fully present, here in this moment completely. They're all hard, but that last one kicks my ass on a regular basis. ;-)

So, I wake up every day and ask, "what does showing up look like today?"
I almost always know the answer, and often it scares the shit out of me... and then I do it anyways.
Usually. ;-)

I've gotten a little older, as tends to happen, and from here I'm finally able to look back at a singular event in my childhood, from which I come away with a deeper and deeper sense of the value of, and obligation to, the life I find myself with. Here is a story that I cannot do justice to in this little space, but I'll make an attempt...

I was 14, and I pulled a muscle playing handball. It didn't heal, so I went to the doctor, and he gave me exercises to do. But, it still didn't heal, and so I went back, and after an initial set of X-rays, he sent me back for more. It was only many years later that I would learn that there was no need for those second X-rays, he just sent me back so he could talk to my mother, who was in her mid thirties at the time, to show her the line of X-ray-purple darkness that ran down the middle of my right thighbone, to offer his condolences and assurances as best he could, and then to await my return.

I, looking at the world through my 14 year old's eyes, did not notice when I returned that she had been crying, and had no idea that after making sure I was out of earshot, he made his apologies, made the obvious diagnosis... visible and nascent, now that he knew what he was looking for, in the original X-rays I'd gotten weeks earlier.

So, I found myself on a grand adventure, from AZ back to the national cancer institute in Bethesda, MD, because it was rare thing, this purple streak, 'one in 5 million,' lucky me. It was a type that almost exclusively happened to boys, and usually during a growth spurt (I was growing an inch a month at the time), and before long I was in a ward with many other boys roughly my age...

They were studying what kinds of chemo would help after removing the cancer itself... I still remember vividly being on one of those medical beds with the crinkly paper, my mother to my left, my step-father to my right, when the doctors came in en masse and the lead doctor, Sugarbaker I think his name was, told me, "Scott, we're going to have to take your leg to save your life."

It seemed pretty straightforward to me. Inside, where if you had asked me about it then, or even now, I might have expected resignation of some sort, there was instead this tremendous fire for life.

But, the study was primary for them, and lucky me, my name came out of the hat to be 'control,' meaning that after losing my leg I would not get the experimental chemo that the other boys got after losing theirs. I would get nothing, and they would wait, and watch, for what they expected to be the inevitable.

Nobody ever told me, until years later, that the mortality rate for this was 96%. I don't know what succes for that study would have looked like, but it surely wasn't what happened.

They watched and waited, looking every week or so for the recurrence in my lungs that they expected as a certitude... but it never showed up. Boys suffered through chemo... One I remember clearly. He was built like a budding footbal player, his arms thick and shoulders broad in a way that my boy-like figure had yet to discover. I remember hearing his cries of pain echoing down the brown tiled government corridors from his room to mine as they tried in vain to clean his wound and get it to heal. Chemo is not good for healing...

For me, there was no recurrence, no infection, nothing. Two of my roommates died. I was stoned on painkillers they fed me for weeks, detached somehow, but my mind recorded everything, and now I look back across over two decades and my heart goes out to these kids, doing their best to survive, and their parents, their siblings, gathered there to offer support as best they could. Only now do I understand the silence of knitting and reading out in the room at the end of the hall where a sparse and well worn collection of books and magazines awaited, where parents and relatives would gather to hold each other, or glare at each other, moving together, or apart, under the crushing stress that enveloped them and the hall of rooms beyond.

They eventually sent me home, where I assured my parents that I was cured... for in my 14 year old mind, unexposed to the facts, I was certain that the cancer was in one place, and they took that away, and that was that. Looking back I can see the stress on their faces... but I was blind to it at the time. When my grandfather took his own life, I was not told that was the reason for his death, nor that it had been connected to me, and I didn't wonder at not going to the funeral.

The mortality rate for that study was at, or above, the 96% mark. Oddly enough, my success in living was their failure...

About this point, when I tell this story, people will say that there was some reason that I lived. No. I cannot, do not believe that. There was no reason that I deserved to live any more than that boy screaming down the hall, than the friendly man who was one of my roommates who showed me the long scar where they'd removed one of his lungs, or the woman, in her early twenties, in a different study, surrounded in her bed in her last days by her family...

I cannot, and do not, believe in an a priori reason for my being here when they are not. We are all perfect in our imperfection, and they no less so than you or I.

But I do feel, more and more now, the sense of obligation to value this life I have, to live, learn, drum, dance (as best I can), play, love, and be present in this life to the fullest degree that I can muster.

If you run across me, and I seem intense, now you know a little about what's behind that intensity. ;-)

And so, I keep showing up, with a vengeance, because I need to, and in an after the fact way, to honor those boys and girls, who deserved at least as much as I do, to be here now, listening to the thunderstorm that has blown in as I wrote this, flashbulbs against windows, the air electric with lightning and memory.