A little distance and the new normal no information...just musing

Looking back over the last few days,  seeing that I haven't made a post since Wednesday just makes me think a little.  I guess we all need a little bit of distance from our difficulties from time to time.  Having both experienced and studied trauma and grief that is one thing I am certain of.  In grief work they call it "portioning."  It is something children do naturally but many of us adults may have developed glitches or defenses that stop this mechanism from working.  Still,  I bet you all can think of a difficult scenario that you faced, and some time in that work, you reached a limit and just had to set it aside for a while and come back to it.  Often when you come back to it, you may have had a new perspective on the problem or at least some renewed energy to face the problem.

With the blog, I think part of it has to do with with acceptance, or what lack of acceptance I am still dealing with, as well as portioning and giving myself a little break from directly thinking about the cancer.  Though it has similarities to denial and one might conceptualize a spectrum, it isn't contradictory to the event, but more like a side track.  When functioning completely healthy, it is like a pitstop in a race, a necessary reprieve to refuel and perform maintenance.  I can identify both healthy and unhealthy elements in my past few days.  I have habits of avoidance in my coping tool bag that sometime don't work well for me.  In this situation, my plan of action is already in place and is not likely to change significantly in the next 4 weeks.  So this one really can go on the back burner and allow me to catch my breath and focus on other things for a day or two, i.e. healthy coping.

The more unhealthy part would be avoidance of communication to reduce the sense of reality.  As I posted before in "Tomorrow..." there are somethings that tend to make situations hit home and feel more palpably real for each of us.  They may be common or distinct to any individual or situation.  For me, and from what I understand generally common, it the fact that writing about something and especially having others read it, tends to bring it from thought in my head, feelings, worries, to something much more real.  So, avoiding communication about something can be a very real denial defense.  It come down to "I don't want to tell you because I don't want to believe it myself."  Though I found other things to do instead of writing in this blog, I was still putting myself in and allowing social situations, and telling people about my experience.

With traumatic situations, as we accept them and they become real in this way, they change who we are.  The nature v. nurture or genetics v. experience debate is well fought, from metaanalysis it looks as though somewhere between 65-80 percent of what we might call our personality or conscious comes from genetics.  That is why we have solid examples of identical twins raised in different cultures with identical mannerisms.  Experience shapes the remaining part of us, and as we develop maturity and awareness, our intention can shape us as well.  Such a dramatic event such as cancer, the death of a close loved one, losing a job unexpectedly, the list goes on..., can significantly change a person.  Events before the age of 25 tend to have an even greater impact because they can have the added effect of developmental interruption.

The real on the other side of the event is never the same as the real before, and this change, especially when so abrupt, is what we resist with denial.  We never really get over it or go back to the way things were, because things aren't the way they were.  I love the quote from Oliver Wendell Holmes, "The mind, once expanded to the dimensions of larger ideas, never returns to it's original size."  I believe this is true for traumatic experience as well, really for any significant experience.  For someone who grew up in the plains of south Dakota, it may be as simple as trekking to the coast and seeing the expanse of the ocean.  Suddenly the world is more expansive and will never be a small again.

I am a cancer survivor and I could sooner forget the ocean is there.  I have experienced cancer from many sides and vantage points, it is woven into the fabric of my being.  Even when I was cancer free for 22 years, it was still apart of my daily life.  From seeing and feeling the scars, to taking pills, even my body can't just get over it.  But then is life really just about "getting over" the tough times and enjoying the good times?  What if we can find joy in the tough times just as some enjoy the resistance of a workout?  What if developing spiritually isn't about living up to an external structure, but rather about being open to the maturation and change that occurs with the experience of life?

In the business, one phrase we use for the whole experience is "new normal" though the sentiment isn't really that different than "getting over" or "getting past" something, it also acknowledges the fact that this event is significant enough to catalyze real change in our being.  Though the essential components are still the same, we may be as different on the other side as a recycled pop bottle when it becomes fleece fabric.  Material makeup is still the same, but the shape, the feel, the texture, even the purpose may be very different.  My belief is, that even though we don't want these things, and I don't believe God purposes us to experience them, the more fully we can accept them and embrace what our new normal might be, the more we develop as fellow humans, as spiritual beings, and the closer we grow to becoming who we created to be.  If the pop bottle really knew how awesome fleece was, would he really want to be a pop bottle any more anyway?

Having shared the end of this life with many people and their families, and sharing the experiences of colleagues and friends, I have seen the difference between people who are still fighting the resistance and those that understand to some extent, the new normal.  Acceptance doesn't remove the pain, the difficulty of the unfairness of a situation, but it does put those things in a more useful perspective.  I may not be able to swim against the current, but I can use the eddies and flow to get where I need to go.  I hope someday, when I am on my death bed, that along the way I will have learned to embrace the new normal with grace.