Wednesday and its an Elders meeting day, always a good day. It is also a day when both of the other people in the household have GONE to work. Yes actually got up and left the house to go to work. Its bliss, I clear the kitchen, make a bacon bagel and wander down to the village shop to buy coconut milk and a paper. I have a five minute burst of culinary activity and load all the ingredients in to the crock-pot, set the timer for 8 hours and bingo there will be chicken curry for tea tonight, just a pan of rice to do later. I am rapidly falling in love with the crock pot, it enables me to in effect cook while I have energy rather than when I am feeling jaded at the end of the day. It also shares out the cooking duties more equitably so that I get to do more cooking. That’s got to be a good thing.
I catch a story on television about a bloke with prostrate cancer who was told in 2014 that he had 2 years to live. 7 years on he is still going strong, in fact he has run over 15, 000 miles raising money for charity during this time. He does not believe in bucket lists just doing what you want to do and for him that’s running and raising money. Hs name is Kevin Webber and his book is called Dead Man Running, out now. It was his positive attitude towards living his life that was interesting.
I’ve said before that I am not the person who feels the need for the extremes. I know I am alive every moment of my days and nights but I also know that I value the people I love and want to be around them in the ordinary day to day life of them. I have always held close the idea that the generative power of everyday living is enormous, one just has to pay attention to it. I’m not sure I would feel any more alive, and likely to live longer, running a jungle ultra marathon than I do when I am paying attention to what I am doing when I am cycling in my Shed. I am sure the physical exercise is the key element not the extremeness of the effort or the environment. I maybe wrong. It maybe that that the adaptions that the body has to make to survive the extreme stress it is put under somehow fights or impedes the growth of cancer. I confess my ignorance and probably need to do more research. If it is true I am still not sure I would run a marathon across ice and snow. However hats off to Kevin Webber, he’s doing something I doubt I could do. I wonder if he can rollerblade.
It is a book I shall read as I am interested in his approach and his story. He himself said that he lives each day in a way that means he does not create new regrets about not doing things. He runs everyday and goes off to run ultra marathons in extreme climates, including jungles where he was accosted by a cobra. I have of course been to Amazon and arranged for a copy to drop through my letter box tomorrow. I am interested how hos clinicians were able to give him two years to live. That seems a bit precise. My lot, “he who made a pact with the devil”,could only say that the chemo would give me an extra 18 months but he could not tell me what the 18 months was being added to. I had to look at the survival curves and work out where my Gleeson score put me. In a report to the GP the oncology team seem to have taken my word for reporting my calculation but not saying what theirs was. So you can see my interest in the fact that it appears some one can make that prediction, even though they now appear to be at least 5 years out to date. When it comes down to it I do not think anyone knows, people just take a punt on a best guess based on some fuzzy statistics. Fuzzy in that the average is what gets reported but not the standard deviations and range. As my sister pointed out life is terminal, cancer just quickens the process maybe.
I attend the Elders group for an hour and a half and as always its a delight to be in conversation with ones peers. The choices that face us as we journey on are interesting. Where do we put our energy to best effect and how do we stay true to the things that bind us together. As we get older the issue of energy management is no small matter. I am certainly aware that I do not have the energy I once had and I want to use what I have in the best way. It is something several Elders share. As I say these meetings are stimulating and are the dialogues that keep me thinking, adapting and trying to make sense of the universe and my relationship to it. Everyone should have spaces like this but unfortunately in this world the room for such spaces is rare and I wonder if there is room in my village to create such a space. I have lunch, try to ring my sister and find I have a defunct mobile number for her and the land line is not answered. There is no answer phone message either. I am slightly perturbed but will ring again later. I draft the blog as my partner returns from going to work and then I head for the Shed to use the exercise bike for an hour. It feels quite chilly as I step outside so when I get in the Shed I put the heater on and clamber onto the bike. It’s clear after a few minutes that the heater was a mistake but I’m too obstinate to get off the bike and turn it off, after all if Kevin Webber can manage a jungle run an hour in a Shed with a heater on should be doable. It turns out it was doable, hot but doable. A reasonable hour of sweat.
Time 
Calories 
Kilometres
As I pedal away the guy who comes to tidy our garden turns up and start to clear the debris away. Once I’ve finished my session I have a chat with him and we decide on what needs to happen now to get the garden winter ready. The peonies and some of the bigger perennials need to be cut back quite harshly to leave room to put some new clumps of spring bulbs. I make him tea and leave him to it so that I can change. My partner goes off to the dentist and I settle down to update the blog and check the progress of the curry. In the background there is an ice hockey on.
My evening is Mock the Week and chicken curry as I run out of energy. I try to ring my sister but cannot get through so send an email. It remains at the top of my the list of things to do. I finish the blog for the day with a sense of distraction that somehow things are not right. Tomorrow I have meetings to start my day and then a load of evidence for a TC accreditation to review and organise for a visit coming up soon. I sense I am not attending to some of the important things.
