Don't Fall Asleep Again! Cancer As A Wake-Up Call

Cancer was a wake-up call for me. Not so much for changing my eating or exercise habits - overall, I had not been treating my body too disrespectfully over the years. Instead, cancer woke me up to life again.

What do I hold as important? Where do I really want to be in life? Am I happy? Soul searching and questions flooded my mind throughout my diagnosis, surgery and chemotherapy.

Questioning what I was drawing from life, reassessing my wants and needs, was a powerful gift - and one for which I am profoundly grateful. Now that I have found myself awake to my life again, I face a challenge that I think many survivors confront. How do I keep from falling asleep again?

During my chemotherapy I wrote a blog to capture and share my experiences with friends and family. Every once in a while I return to read my blog. Increasingly, it becomes difficult to fully identify with the person who went through that experience. However - the blog helped to keep me awake long enough to establish new directions in my life. In the end, keeping from falling asleep required being blunt with myself. I could have died from cancer. I fought the cancer with surgery and chemotherapy, and I kept my body alive. Was I willing to allow my newly re-discovered spirit to die while I fell back into a semi-dreamlike existence as I walked through the day living on "default"? I chose to fight to keep my spirit alive with as much tenacity as I fought for my body.

If you are a cancer survivor, whether going through chemotherapy and/or radiation currently, or have been declared "cancer free" for years, do not let the gift you were given rot on the vine. You were blessed with a wake-up call that gave you a chance to reflect and assess who you have been, who you are, who you want to be, where you have been and, more importantly, where you want to go.

Take time each day to sit and breathe. Some advice given to me while I was undergoing treatment was to learn how to tell the difference between what was important and what was urgent - and to do what was important. What is more important than a life lived in alignment with who you are, with the "shape of your soul"? That, I think, is what is important.

Each moment life offers you choice. In the book of Deuteronomy in the Old Testament we are told: "Behold, I have set before you this day life and good, and death and evil". Choose life - the life of your real self, not the self conditioned by what the world has told you should be. Cancer gave you the gift to awaken to who you really are. Take up the challenge and answer it by living the most amazing life you desire.