checking in...

I spent some time in Starbucks this morning while waiting for my appointment and I ended up finishing the book My Year of Living Biblically by A.J. Jacobs! One word (three syllables!); a.ma.zing. Seriously…it was brilliant and refreshingly humorous! Jacobs is a writer for Esquire Magazine and decided to take his secular self and live an entire year following all the rules of the Bible as literally as possible. This is no easy feat for anyone nonetheless a New Yorker!!

I honestly thought that the book was fantastic and I was sad when it ended. I loved seeing the manner in which a person would change shape while learning all about the Bible for the first time and in many ways, we share very similar beliefs. Though Jacobs is agnostic and I’m Catholic, I very much agree with the words of David Usher; “I believe your truth is not my truth and that God can exist in many places at one time”. This is not a view that many of my fellow Catholics would be happy to share with me but for better or worse, I’m okay with a world of mixed beliefs…even if they are not mine!

My favourite part of the book was the manner in which Jacobs would do little “status reports” throughout the course of the book reporting on the evolution of his faith as he ventured further into his year. I like the idea of taking momentary checks with your self. I don’t do that enough. I have a tendency to look back when all is said and done…but hardly ever “mid-stream”. So it compelled me take some time this morning during my walk to work to do a mental status report on my post-traumatic stress progress.

Where am I? Really?

Quantitatively, I’m seven weeks into my ten weeks of dissecting my feelings regarding what happened. Mentally, I sometimes I wonder if my doctor is going to make it out of this alive! I’m not always the most gracious of patients. Emotionally, I’m tired of the process. I often walk out of there feeling as though I’ve just survived a severe gang beating; twenty years of fearing cancer takes hold of me and never fails to kick my ass. Needless to say that I don’t really feel like I’m winning this battle at this moment. It makes me wonder what the real cancer is; the potential tumour or the never ending fear of something that may or may not ever exist? Either way, I certainly know which one is more poisonous. This thought eventually led to another one though and it posed the question of whether or not this is actually a battle to be won or lost? Perhaps it’s actually a nagging roommate that I need to learn to be friends with so we can be in the same room together without fighting over the remote control. Perhaps we were always meant to share the same space but we just never determined the ground rules of living together yet. Maybe it’s about cohesiveness instead of a notice of eviction…about understanding instead of conquering. Maybe it’s about not just checking in with my self more often but also with the big bad monster that lives under my bed.

Or maybe my big bad monster needs to spend some time with my doctor instead of me…I’m tired of being the middle man!!