I was awoken the other morning (by morning - I mean 4am) by flashing blue & red lights and the loud mechanical humming of fire trucks outside our next-door neighbor's house. In the end, it was only a carbon monoxide alarm that triggered the turnout, but it brought to light a certain cycle of life that is becoming more and more common in our world. We encounter an emergency (either personal or within our community/state) that garners a great deal of attention in the moment, and then becomes a crazy story and memory shortly thereafter (all too often one whose aftermath can drag on for days, weeks, months, or even years).
But it gave me cause for reflection (I tend to have a busy brain). Once the event has passed - then what? We register, we react, we respond, we rebound and then we seek to return to some kind of reset "normal" in the wake of the situation. Take for example, something like . . . I don't know, say cancer. There is the numbing and overwhelming moment when we learn of the diagnosis. Then come the phases of anger and acceptance. Followed by the development and implementation of a treatment program over a period of time - long or short depending on the prognosis. If all works out according to plan, we are able to conquer the Big C (it never goes exactly according to plan, but modern oncology science has more and more therapeutic alternatives). And then after the emergency has passed and the crowd has dispersed, we are left with our new life as is, and the need to reset our perspective to living with a new normal (an overused term, but one that is actually applicable in this circumstance).
That's the status where I, and so many others like me are for now -- and moving forward. That's really the operative phrase here: moving forward. Whether blessed with a positive outcome or burdened with a tragic result, we are forced to move forward. A direction imposed upon us by life that we must adopt for ourselves, our loved ones and anyone else that we encounter for the rest of our hoped-for lives. I can only speak for myself when I say that it's not as heavy of a burden as that may have sounded (no hyperbole intended), but it is an undeniable truth that has changed my life landscape forever. I can't control the cancer (ie: ‘emergency’), but I can control what happens next. It's up to me to chart the course of how and where I will go moving forward. Managing the baggage of my disease, my day-to-day response to that medical reality, and the direction that I will go in the aftermath of that predicament.
