The trouble is, you think you have time. –Jack Kornfield, attributed falsely to Buddha, but actually from Carlos Castaneda

Nine miles through time

I took a nine mile walk this morning. I did a lot of thinking as I pounded over the concrete and tar and wooden planks. I thought about the past. I thought about the present. I thought about the future.

…it begins with loving life…

I often think about the future when I walk–but today was subtly different. Usually, the future I think about is tied firmly to the past. I think about the next fundraiser, the next project, where I want Walking with Jane to be six months from now, a year from now, five years from now–and how we’ll get there.

Buddha time

But I woke up with Jack Kornfield’s fake Buddha quote in my mind this morning. It has haunted me all week, like a friend trying to get my attention: “You think you have time–time for everything; but you are not taking time for yourself. You are wrapped up in this disease that killed your wife–you are letting it kill you. Your life needs to be about more than killing this disease.”

I took a nine mile walk this morning.

It’s not the first time I’ve heard similar words in recent weeks. “You need to find a way to get out of yourself,” a friend told me two weeks ago. “You need to escape for a while.” And I do. I need to do something frivolous and silly and filled with meaning beyond the round of daily research and training for the next walk and planning the next event.

Cuts in time

Kornfield’s thought cuts in two directions. Jane and I thought we had time–time to write the books, time to travel, time to wake comfortably in each others arms. We did not have that time. I think I have time–but I know I don’t have time. There is an urgency to killing this disease that Jane’s death underlines for me every day–that the patients and caregivers I talk to underline every day.

‘You think you have time…’

But there needs to be time for something else, as well. Jane did not want me to stop living when she died. But the journey back from the land of the dead is a hard one for a living man–especially when there seems so little on that surface world that matters beyond the battle anymore.

A different time

And that is how this morning’s walk was different for a time. Intellectually, I know I likely have three or more decades of productive life in front of me. I am in better health than the vast majority of people my age. A twenty-mile walk does not strain my system, nor does a day of shoveling sand or rock. I know that.

The Buddha’s thought cuts in two directions.

But this morning, I felt it as well. I can’t spend 30 years as a walking dead man. It is not in me. And that means planning for things beyond killing cancer. It means finding a way to live again.

Life, death, and time

This is not to say I am walking away from the task at hand–far from it. But I’ll be far better at that fight if I can stop living with the dead past so much of the time. I know how badly my grief has crippled me. It leaves me unable to do more than stare at the wall a day or two a week–even when I know what I need to be doing.

I can’t spend 30 years as a walking dead man.

I used to teach T. S. Eliot’s Murder in the Cathedral. In it, he talks about the difference between living and partly living. Jane and I spent our lives fully living. Since her death, I have spent too much of my time partly living. I have forgotten the key to being fully alive is to live–to live fully in every moment, to experience every moment fully, to embrace every moment and every emotion fully.

Time to move forward

It’s time I got back to that. I’m not sure how I’ll accomplish it, but for a few minutes this morning, I was there–and I felt really good for the first time in a very long time.

…the key to being fully alive is to live…

I think, though, that it begins with loving life–a thing I suspect I understand far better for having embraced death so closely.