(Written as my quarterly column for a medical magazine)

When I first heard the phrase Bridges to Excellence, I thought perhaps the magazine’s topic was focusing on advances in dental technology.  But, then I realized that I really had no idea what the issue was about so I did the intelligent thing.  I asked.  Someone answered.  I still didn’t understand.  So, I did the unintelligent thing; I decided to take off on a personal flight of fancy.

Ladies and gentlemen, please, buckle your seatbelts, bring your seats to the full, upright position, and prepare for take-off.  Please turn off any electronic devices, so I may have your undivided attention for the next few minutes.  Before we reach cruising altitude, let us attempt some simple comprehension.  Read the following carefully.

Excellence \ˈek-s(ə-)lən(t)s\|     noun

the quality of being outstanding or extremely good

archaic; an outstanding feature or quality.

Now, just what the heck does that mean, outstanding or extremely good?  Big deal.  It even has an archaic meaning for a simply an outstanding feature or quality.  Piffle!  Once you are “extremely good,” then what?  Then, nada, zilch, big ostrich egg.  That’s as good as it gets and you’re on your way to a high level that leads to a gradual decline because, as everyone knows, the laws of entropy kick in.

So, if excellence is all you shoot for, you’re just setting yourself up for entropic decay.  Look at the record, so to speak.  Mathematically, an ascending curve that ends in excellence becomes a flat line.  That flat line then continues, but never again ascends; therefore, over any period of time, it must begin to go into retrograde, and start descending.  Just ask IBM who shot for excellence, hit it, got smug, and almost went out of business because smaller competitors were shooting for something else.  Fortunately, IBM learned its lesson, and now excellence isn’t good enough, henceforth they are on the comeback trail.

Come on, there has to be something better we can go for.  Hey!  I’ve got it! 

(Ladies and gentlemen, please tighten your seat belts as we may be encountering some emotional and psychic disturbance while your perceptions are turned upside down).

Exceptional \ik-ˈsep-shnəl, -shə-n^əl\     adjective

1. unusual, uncommon, atypical, extraordinary, out of the ordinary, rare,  unprecedented, unexpected, surprising. 2 outstanding, extraordinary, remarkable, special, excellent, phenomenal, prodigious; unequaled, unparalleled, unsurpassed, peerless, matchless, nonpareil, first-rate, first-class; informal A1, top-notch.

Now, there’s a word that has some room for growth!  It is excellence and much more.  It’s prodigious, it’s rare, it’s surprising, hey, even on the down low it’s A1 and top-notch! 

Yes, let’s ditch (pardon the phrase) the merely excellent and go for the exceptional!  Look at the possibilities: there is no entropy here because it is peerless and it’s extraordinary.  It does all of this while being unexpected and constantly surprising!  Constantly surprising!  That means it can always head off the charts. Visualize in your a big PowerPoint® slide.  Picture a line going from bottom left — starting at “barely getting by” — in a steeply ascending curve toward the upper right-hand corner, passing through “good enough” where it hits “excellent.”  Got it? Good.  Now, imagine that line doing the exceptionally impossible; see it leave the chart in a 3-D form and shoot out into space at a right angle off the screen.  That is where you find the exceptional.  Off the charts of previously perceived possibility!  Yes, it means you have to be completely unrealistic.  Why?

Because realistic has come to mean: “look at why we can’t do that; look at why that is impossible.”  Being realistic in a time of unfathomable change just won’t cut it.  It is time to go for the completely unrealistic and imagine the exceptional.  Stay with that image, use it, and make it work.

Ladies and gentlemen, and all of you who remain undecided as of yet, now that we are at our cruise altitude, I offer for your consideration the following concept:  let’s get rid of the wimpy, merely excellent, and go for being off the charts EXCEPTIONAL.  You are invited to use your exceptional imaginations to resolve the problem of building bridges which have yet to be conceived of.  If you don’t think it can be done, consider the unrealistic champions of the past: Charles Lindbergh, Madame Curie, Jonas Salk, Robert Jarvik, MD, along with your humble captain, C.W. Metcalf.  Oh, that’s me.   A dozen, intelligent, well-meaning physicians have told me for four years than I had anywhere from a few hours to several months to live.  But, I was totally unrealistic and shot off the charts in search of the exceptional.

Believe me when I say that if I can be writing this column, you can be building completely unrealistic, exceptional Bridges to Excellence.  Keep your seat belts fastened and your trays in the upright position.  You will hear from me again as we approach our exceptional landing.

Humor, Life and Death

A Fictional, Non-Fiction, Reality-Essay, Short Story…Not.

Angle of view, distance of time, tension for too long contained–so many geometric shifts of mind can contort any emotion into its opposite.

On June 7th of this year, In Omaha, Nebraska, I stood backstage, preparing to deliver a talk entitled  “Lighten Up and Live” before an audience of over 500 cancer survivors and their families.  That presentation was an installment on a debt that will never be fully repaid.  Because, for more than a decade, it has been my volunteer work with cancer and Aids patients that has, literally, granted me a new career and a constantly renewed sense of joy in being alive.  As the Master of Ceremonies began to tell the audience about the afternoon’s program, my mind wandered back to how my debt to these survivors had been incurred.

In 1978, while I was researching material for a television special on the Center for Attitudinal Healing in Tiburon, California, a young cancer patient turned my world upside down.  That boy, I’ll call him Todd, approached me one day at a gathering of young cancer patients, their families and friends.

I had drawn away from the group to be alone on the porch and ponder a disquieting question: How could those people–all of whom had one problem that made my difficulties seem incidental–maintain such a sense of compassion, joy and hope?  It seemed “unrealistic” to me.  After all, I knew that the world was a dark and dangerous place.  I had learned that lesson early, and had nurtured it for more than thirty years.  I hadn’t noticed Todd approaching me, and was startled when he tugged on my jacket to get my attention.

He was very frail, completely bald-headed and his eyes were focused on me with a disquieting intensity.  He made me very nervous.

“What do you want?” I asked in a tone more irritable than I intended.

“You don’t look to good,” he said hesitantly, “you wanna come in and sit down?”

I was stunned.  This kid, who had obviously suffered a great deal in his bout with cancer, was worried about me?  He thought I didn’t look good?

(It didn’t occur to me until years later, after I had learned more about cancer treatment and patients, who because I was bald, he thought I was a cancer patient, too.)

Before I could respond he took my hand and almost whispered, “Do you hurt much?”

Well, I lost it.  I started to cry because I thought that, somehow, this child had seen my soul, and knew it was maimed.

As I pretended to cough and try to hold back the tears, Todd said,  “It’s okay, I was scared in the beginning, too.  If you want to talk to me or my folks, we’re in there by the fireplace.”

He let go of my hand, patted me the back with his small hand, grinned and said, “Hey, we’re here to help each other, so, lighten up!”  Then he grinned and left me

Lighten up?  I asked myself.  Lighten up?  How could he say that?  What did he know that I didn’t?

Well, it’s been nearly fifteen years, and I’m still learning from people like Todd.  That’s why, whenever my schedule permits, I attempt to repay the patients, their families, hospice volunteers and professional healthcare providers, for the lessons I continue to learn.  And every time I speak to people like the Survivor’s Day group in Omaha, I learn even more about the enormous strength, tenacity endurance and, yes, even humor, that it takes to cope with and frequently survive the threat of cancer.

Since 1983 I have built a business with a worldwide corporate clientele that is based on what I’ve learned from my hospice experience.  So, my hospice friends, clients and co-workers not only changed my life but, through our business, they have affected the lives of literally millions of others.  That is why my thanks can never fully be repaid; and, that is why I went to Omaha for Cancer Survivors Day.

The Omaha event was sponsored by a mutual effort of local area hospitals.  Those hospitals had set aside their competitive interests to help cancer survivors celebrate and communicate a message of healing and hope to thousands of others, a message was put succinctly by Ms. Pam McCoy when she was honored with the Spirit of Survivorship award prior to my presentation.

“Just because they say you have cancer,” she said, “doesn’t mean you have to die.”

Pam received the award, among other reasons, for her service to fellow patients.  During her radiation and chemo treatments, she noticed that some people were missing appointments because they were too tired to drive to see a doctor.  While still coping with her own disease, she applied for a job driving a van for Bergan Mercy Hospital that takes patients to receive treatment.

I wasn’t surprised by her altruistic efforts.  As I stood backstage, I recalled that  the people who seem to do best when coping with illness, are those who pay as much attention to helping others as they do to helping themselves.  I would learn that  when we reach out to others we are affirming the value and sanctity of life, as well as manifesting the respect and love which nourish us all when things are difficult.  And, through her volunteer work, this woman was accessing another common denominator of many survivors–involvement in a community of understanding peers who share common problems and solutions.  Pam’s next words completed the picture of survivors that I had seen evolve over the years.

“I believe we’re called here for a purpose,” Ms. McCoy told her audience.  “But before you can help anyone with anything, you have to be able to laugh at yourself.  Life’s too short to be on a serious roller coaster all of the time.”

Since the children and their families at the Center for Attitudinal Healing had embraced me in 1978, I have continued to see that sense of purpose, that ability to make their experience count for something, as a hallmark of survivors.  And, through it all, I have seen a remarkable capacity for humor underscore a renewed sense of joy in life–even in the most difficult situations that some patients must confront.

As the audience rose to offer Pat McCoy a standing ovation, I remembered literally dozens of moments encapsulated in my memory of how many cancer patients use humor to disarm their fears, to find absurdity in the things that threaten them, and thereby gain control.  And, I thought of how I had come to Omaha to return that gift to this audience of survivors.

Oh, I wasn’t going to teach them how to tell jokes–that’s comedy, and comedy is an art form I had learned that humor was a set of developed skills which were common among people who remain creative under pressure; skills that were shared by those who survived unbroken by the crisis, chaos and change of human experience.

I certainly didn’t intend to tell them that humor skills would make anyone live a long time.  After all, if humor made us live  longer, where did all those bitter, nasty people we know come from?  Besides, I had seen some of the most upbeat, joyful, humor filled souls I knew die.  But, they had died in ways that magnified and uplifted those around them.

The applause ebbed as Pat returned to her seat.  I heard someone begin to introduce me.  Quickly, I ran through the elements that Pat had reminded me of which seem so common among not only cancer survivors, but among those who survive the multitude of trials we will all face in some way.

1)  They are actively altruistic.  They spend as much time helping others as they do attending to their own needs; they exhibit an avid desire to make their experience count for something.

2) They are sustained by a higher power of some kind, some sense of their part in a Divine Mystery that defies human comprehension.

3) They have, or develop, a vivid imagination that allows them to literally “see” their way through difficulty, and achieve a most powerful strength of unreasonable, logic defying being.

4) They are involved in a community of individuals where pain, hope, problems and solutions are shared.

5) They discipline themselves to focus on, nourish and sustain their sense of humor and joy in being alive.  They learn to take their disease, problem or job seriously while taking themselves lightly–so, they never become their problem.

As the MC continued my introduction, I realized that one young boy who reached out to me in Tiburon in 1978 had illuminated all five of those elements.

When I walked out on stage to speak to the Cancer Survivors Day group, I realized that just being there was going to give me more than I could offer in return.  It’s odd really.  A debt that grows larger and less burdensome every time I make a payment.  What a gift.

©  C.W.Metcalf  6/15/92

First, the term “alternative care,” means nothing to me. I understand caring, and I have received care from a wide variety of approaches including Western allopathic to homeopathic, acupuncture, Chinese herbalism, Native American ceremonies, a broad range of Spiritual teaching, and far more.

Second, it would be misleading and dangerous for me to suggest that anything I have done would be of value to others. I do believe that anyone’s perspective and/or persistence alters whatever external approaches are taken. (Other factors would include family history, genetic encoding, personal support, and a list of multiple determinants unknown to me.)

Finally, what I have done cannot be proven to have had any effect what so ever. The care I received from at Eisenhower Medical Center in Rancho Mirage, CA, undoubtedly supported my 8-month journey into remission from AML. Subsequent support from health-care professionals at Virginia Mason in Seattle, WA, and Torrance Memorial Medical Center in CA, continues to be a major part of my ongoing treatment.

In conjunction with the support of friends, family and Spiritual allies, the following approaches appear to have helped. They are offered only for your consideration and should not be considered as recommended. (I am not a doctor, a shaman, or an herbalist, and my major television appearance was as a clown on “Happy Days”).

My research and interviews with others in the community of cancer dancers led me, in June of 2005, to two treatments that I have been deeply involved in ever since.

The first is based on the evolving science of glyconutrients, and involves plant-based products distributed by Mannatech. You can learn more at:

www.mannapages.com/jkintl

The second is grounded in research still considered incomplete by nearly everyone in the medical community. Below are a series of sites regarding Rife technology, including a negative view from “quackwatch.org”.

http://www.rife.org/

http://www.rense.com/health/rife.htm

http://www.royalrife.com/

http://www.quackwatch.org/04ConsumerEducation/News/rife.html

Just this year I was introduced to a well-researched approach to therapy called Somatic Experiencing; the benefits for me have been very positive, and anyone interested can learn more at:

http://www.traumahealing.com/

Without hesitation I can offer what I have come to call the Three “P’s:” Prayer, Perspective and Persistence.

None of the above is anything more than a story; it is my story and I would appreciate hearing anyone else’s.

©C.W. Metcalf 2 March 2007

C.W. Metcalf

“The self is not something that one discovers…
it is something that one creates.”
Thomas Szas

We can no longer deceive ourselves into believing that we have control of anything that happens outside of us. There was a time when we had time: a time when events moved slowly enough to allow us the delusion of control. Abruptly, however, the Stone Age ended. The speed of population, power and technological progress went into hyper-drive. Ever since, we have been struggling to cope with quantum leaps of complexity while desperately attempting to maintain a sense of control.

Finally, we have reached a stage where not only control, but even comprehension of our complex world, lives and spirits has been utterly shattered. Now, we are in the “real world” where our last stand for control is being waged: control of all we ever had to work with in the first place, control of how we choose to act instead of react, how we choose to view the events of our lives.

There is a joy in chaos and unpredictability, but it requires a major shift in how we see ourselves in relationship to the world around us: We must learn the wisdom of Albert Einstein who posited that the perfect answer opens the door to a thousand unforeseen questions; the courage of NBC’s Katie Couric, who turned events that could be seen as tragedy into opportunity to be of value to others; the vision of those yet without eyes to see.

“The last of the human freedoms is to choose one’s attitude in any
given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.”
Viktor Frankel

© by C.W. Metcalf 2 March 2007

THE MYTH OF BALANCE

(WARNING: If you are in upper management, go directly to Paragraph 4.)

More and more, I am hired by companies to help address the issue of “Work/Life Balance”. I don’t accept every offer because experience has shown that some in upper management, and their bosses, the shareholders, really don’t care about a life-sustaining workplace. They do care about profits; so, when even the most stress-resistant workaholics begin to crack, folks like me show up to offer various trainings. There is little in the way of committed follow-through after these events. The expectation that you will do more with less, in a global marketplace that is different in the morning than it was when you went to bed, grinds on. Eventually, things get worse and some CEO who tried to serve two masters—the employees and the stockholders–is paid millions to leave because he or she screwed up, and the cycle begins again.

I prefer to work with organizations that are genuinely committed to providing an enjoyable, life-sustaining work environment that keeps retention high and is far more productive and consistently profitable over time. Fortunately, there are more such organizations that you might think.

(End of tirade: now we can move on to the main topic.)

The concept of Work/Life Balance seems a worthy one. On closer inspection, I find that it is based on false assumptions that must be changed in order to gain the real objective.

One: There is the presumption that “work” and “life” are two separate forms of existence. While many people have to work at jobs they consider demeaning in order to support themselves, just as many work at careers which they actually like. However, there is no doubt that something needs to change. After all, when was the last time someone came up to you and said: “Well, I’m ahead of schedule–how about you?” In today’s world, being a little less behind than the competition is about the greatest edge one can hope for.

Perhaps a better description of the concern would be for “Life Balance.” Unfortunately, that leads us to the most defective presumption.

Two: Balance is a myth! True balance would require that we play 40 hours for every 40 hours we work–not to mention the 40 hours with friends and family, or the 40 hours we might want to spend alone! (Let me see: 7 days x 24 hours = 168 hours. So, given the above formula for balance, we are left with 8 hours per week for the physical necessities of sleep, nutrition, elimination, etc.) Perhaps balance is not what we seek.

Twenty years ago, while working for a Japanese company on retreat in Bali, I had the privilege of meeting an elder whom the locals considered a seer.

“She was old when my mother was a child,” my 60-something guide said as we entered a small thicket of palms and grasses where Ni Oka Satriya held court. This woman was reportedly over a hundred years old, but her alert eyes reflected light like luminescent black pearls. As she spoke Old Balinese, our meeting required two interpreters. (It took fifteen minutes just to exchange a few honorary words.)

She sat on a small bench, wrapped in a bright batik sari. She did not look directly at me until she asked her first question, which finally babbled its way through the interpreters as: “What is the purpose of your life?”

It seems that when you are a Centenarian Seer, the time for chitchat is minimal.

I tried to explain that my work was intended to help people achieve balance. So, I drew a line in the sand at her feet, with a fulcrum sign under the center. To further visualize my communication, I held my arms straight out, moving back and forth until I became still, when I repeated, “Balance!” She looked at me, laughed, and said in perfect English, “Oh, you mean dead?”

Giggling at my confusion, she then drew a wavy line beneath my line of balance along with a series of cryptographic symbols. The interpreters told me that there was no word in Old Balinese for “balance,” so the closest they could come to in English translation was “Harmony” (and yes, it deserves a capital H). We went back to using Old Balinese-Indonesian-English because the Seer deemed English to be too limited a language in which to express herself. “Everything in nature that is not moving is dead,” she explained. “Like a corpse. Even stones are living. Over time, rocks change shape, size and appearance in their dance with weather.” For the Seer, Harmony meant learning “how to sing your life’s song,” in tune with the events and people around you.

It would be ten years before I truly understood what that old woman was trying to tell me. But then, I’m stuck with thinking in English.

After my first brain surgery in 1996, which I had been told I would likely not survive, I awoke after a 26-hour operation in a room full of medical machines. Had any of them shown a flat, balanced line, I would have been . . . well, dead.

The music and dancing sine waves of those machines brought back the memory-lessons of the Bali wise woman’s description of Harmony that I had been offered a decade earlier.

Unlike balance, Harmony can be achieved–it is, in fact, the natural state of things. In the always changing composition of our lives, Life Harmony means putting down the baton and finding our place in the orchestra; it means we all must learn to improvise so that work, play, difficulty, success, and silence become interwoven in the shifting rhythms of life.

If my readers are interested, I can offer more examples in future Fluid Newsletters. But now it is time for me to be silent, because, as Albert Einstein once said:

“If A is a success in life, then A equals x plus y plus z. Work is x; y is play; and z is keeping your mouth shut.”

The “Dancing with the Cancer Bear” image came to me during my nearly four-week ICU vacation in May of 2003. I was unable to speak or do much more than scrawl
illegibly on a chalkboard, and my maternal grandfather paid me a brief
visit. The visit was particularly notable because Grandpa Roy had died fifty years previously, not long after I was born. In fact, he had to introduce himself, which he
did by showing me an old tin-type photo of himself and my grandmother that I had
seen on her mantle as a young boy.

“When ya dance with The Bear,” he said softly–so as not to disturb the
other patients, I presume–“Ya don’t get to take no break; ya have ta keep
dancin’ ’til the bastard drops.”

It is still my most vivid memory of ICU—well, besides that I-could-almost-swear-it-really-happened hallucination about Jack Bauer sneaking in to break me out.

These letters began as a way of communicating with friends, family, and
benefactors whose support, both spiritual and financial, literally helped
save my life. They continue as a tribute to the remarkable people I have
bumped into on various dance floors along the way.

C.W. Metcalf 1 Feb. 07

Okay, I understand that a lot of people are beginning to wonder if I have, or ever did have, cancer. After all, isn’t four years a long time for one guy to be terminal with leukemia? (I have to admit that there was that ersatz cancer back in the 70’s when a doctor diagnosed an x-ray shadow as “a remotely possible bone cancer.” I never went back for a biopsy, but I set about dying for a year or two of what, eventually, turned out to be a “dense bone mass due to an old injury.” That was several years before I got clean and sober. In truth, I suffered from a damned-near terminal case of dramatic indulgence and self-pity. And no, I don’t want to talk about karma right now.)

That was then, and this is now. In a fairly recent now–November 28, 2006, to be exact–oncologist Dr. Hool gave me the results of my latest bone marrow biopsy: After almost three years of fluctuating symptoms, I was officially out of remission. I was immediately signed up for Hospice Care. Depression set in, and that was at the high end of my emotional range.

For a few months prior to that November visit, my bone pain had increased to an almost crippling degree. Lethargy led me to sleep 16 to 18 hours out of every 24. The post-diagnostic depression did not help. On the upside, my insurance didn’t run out until March of ‘07, and my home health care was covered. Still, something was missing.
Ah, yes . . . resignation!

I just couldn’t embrace the supposed reality of my impending death. Since my 8-month hospitalization for AML in 2003, I have collected several doctors’ signatures on forms that claim I had anywhere from 48 hours to a few weeks or months to live. Some of those verdicts made me angry or mildly depressed, but I always found strength in “The Three P’s”: Perspective, Persistence and Prayer. Okay, so I was in denial; I was unrealistic, I was an idiot. I heard all of those too, but they didn’t stop me. Instead, I discovered emotional gifts and possibilities that made me more determined than ever not to give up. I trudged back up the soggy, brick road to the alternative doctor I reverently call my “Seattle Quack.”

The Quack took me on in June of ‘05, when one of the most prestigious cancer care centers in the country told me that I didn’t qualify for a marrow transplant and could only be offered palliative care (which, in case you haven’t heard the term yet, means “pain pills until you die.”) Under the Quack’s care my pain lessened, at least most of the time, and hey, I stayed alive.

Last November the Quack retested me, shifted my supplements and tinctures, and put me back on the Rife machine I had so idiotically sold when I left Seattle in May of ‘06. (Hey, I was better! What did I need with that machine any more? Besides, according to decades of antagonistic testing, the technology didn’t work anyway. I had signed a release attesting to my knowledge of that “fact” when treatment first began. I think it was something required by the government, whose faithful public servants look askew at cancer improvements outside of the drug companies’ purview: oops, where’d that soapbox come from?)

Within a few weeks of my new regimen, I had cut my pain meds in half and I was only sleeping 12 of every 24 hours.

As chance would have it, I then took a meeting on the Queen Mary in Long Beach, CA, with a group of people—most of whom I had never met before—which super-fueled the healing process.

The Agency Speakers, a talent management agency that had impressed me with rare qualities of ethical, moral and compassionate consideration for both their talent and their clients, had invited me to join their roster. The other speakers were kind enough to fly from around the country to meet near where I am now living.

Halfway through the second day in mid-December 2006, I realized I wasn’t so tired and had forgotten to take any pain medication. Our group was on the verge of creating an organization I had only dreamed of since my public speaking career had discovered me nearly 25 years ago. (For more information, click on •Agency Speakers Associates, when you return to the Blog site.)

My revitalized health regimen, plus a new focus on reinventing myself as part of a team designed to make a difference in the world, seems to have recharged my Spirit engine.

Oh, I’m still out of remission, but my January 8, 2007 visit with Dr. Hool revealed that the progression of my illness has virtually stalled, and I am, in my esteemed doctor’s words, “Looking healthier than I’ve seen you in months.”

Sure, it could all go south tomorrow, but who knows? Perhaps south is in the direction of healing. The Cancer Bear and I are still dancing, but at least I’m leading. Again.

Future Fluid Newsletters will address a number of issues and concerns as they arise, or that I hold in common with my clients/subscribers. We will also welcome your stories and observations, which may be included here.

However, as all of my work emphasizes fluidity and Learning To Be Water, and because I am something of a closet poet, this newsletter contains a piece I wrote after the long recovery following my first brain surgery in 1996. During that period, I was literally inundated with images of water from rain to streams and oceans. In the decade since, I have had another brain surgery, four cancers and attendant difficulties. Through it all the discoveries, which revealed themselves to me in the poem below, have helped me understand that water, which is essential to all of existence, was to be my new teacher.

Trappers Creek

A stream filled with micro-life to small to see. I am standing here nothing less than
a visible collection of those same organisms fluid and yet having forgotten I slowly petrify.

In this place I am reminded of a liquid continuity that knows how to flow around, under, between, over and through all obstacles in our path. This is my retreat and our reminder–Learn to be water. Move naturally without fear, embrace each new obstacle as an opportunity to transform and cleanse.
(Written: November 96)

Since my search for healing led me to leave my home in June of 04, I have been housed by Grace and the kindness of friends; I have lived in everything from a palatial, walled estate, to a Winnebago motor home, and now dwell in a new city the site and name of which is, like so much which has evolved from my altered perspective, irrelevant.

As I write this it is exactly three years since I first entered the hospital and my family was told “…any treatment would only prolong his suffering.” They chose, as I would have, to prolong my suffering. It was the first of at least seven, official, written prognostications over time that I would be dead in a matter of hours to months. The physical suffering continues, at a much-reduced intensity; along the way I have experienced a range of agonies from physical and psychological to perceptive and spiritual. That “suffering” has also become irrelevant.

What is now significant has more to do with silence, Divine Mystery and a new understanding of Love, although within that embrace are also laughable absurdity, deceit and the morphing story of my truth.

On Your Mark… Personal research has shown me that most people who experience the kind of suffering and profound “near death experiences” I have known go, within about six months, from a renewed sense of elation and hope right back to the previously rutted story of their. Of the small percentage who maintain and take continued action to manifest a new vision of life, about half apparently become so enamored of their new story as to border on what I perceive to be zealous idiots, self-deceived hustlers, or well-meaning fools. They become celebrities speaking for the dead, or they found cults that feed on the desperation of others to “know” about an afterlife. (My judgments exist because I am still evolving, finding deceit in others and myself a most common behavior.) Other survivors move from appreciative and less materially obsessed to an evolving spiritual introspection that manifests itself in a variety of positive ways.One woman I have spoken with quit her job as a corporate executive and has devoted her life to Hospice volunteer work where her peers and clients alike, consider her to be the most compassionate and calming of individuals. Another man chose to use his considerable, corporate power to begin creating what he calls “the compassionate workplace.”Prior to my various dances with two craniotomies, three cancers and seven flat-line events I was a public speaker and, depending upon whom you to talked to, everything from a self-obsessed egoist who bordered on being a pathological liar, to a gregarious and helpful man. (Probably all of those descriptions were fitting to a degree.) What has changed? The first thing I noticed was the overwhelming content of deceit in human interactions, beginning with my own. I had an abrupt awareness of how barely a sentence came out of my mouth that did not contain some element of deceit. I had always had difficulty with “white lies,” I.E: acceptable deceits such as “dinner was terrific, Aunt Marge, “ when one would have rather eaten live snails dipped in rancid butter; or, “Fat? No, that dress makes you look quite seductive. I grew up a liar in a house where lies were commonplace: “Daddy is face down in his soup because he is tired,” rather than “Daddy is drunk,” I attended public schools and churches where I was acutely aware that the same people who professed high moral conduct were also those who sexually molested me. Then there were the standard locker room lies, and constant proof that the leaders of our country were non-stop liars.Okay, so I lied, but it was to spare you being hurt (a clever disguise for not feeling my own potential pain) or to make myself seem more than the loser I feared being. That habit pattern continued until I got clean and sober in 1982; still, it was so ingrained that when I made an attempt to become more honest my modest progress was tempered by the fact that I achieved cleverly sublimated forms of self-deception. The two craniotomies, in 1996 and 2002, stripped away more of the excuses and I was convinced that I had become a more honest man. Then the Cancer Bear grabbed me for a slam-danceathon that took everything God, my friends and I had to survive. The Dance became a slow and painful Gavotte after my release from the hospital just before Christmas of 2003. Honesty was less an issue than simply surviving, or so I thought. Not so slowly, those things that I had felt were precious to me were stripped away. First, I had to leave my family to seek treatment. I have not lived at home for nearly two years, and I miss my young children so much that to write of it still dissolves me to tears. Second, the avalanche of expenses combined with my limited, and eventual inability to work, reduced me from a paper millionaire to a literal pauper within a matter of months. Third, The Dance oscillated between apparent triumph and disaster so often that my sense of hope was often impaired. It was not until I made the decision to live, and cease focusing on out dancing the damned bear, that I experienced a depth of spiritual awakening which had evaded me.

Get Set…. My new and trusted oncologist asked that I apply for disability as travel and being around large groups of people, which was central to my work, threatened my compromised immune system. So much time was being spent on paying the monthly bills I had accrued, trips to and from various clinics and simply getting through a day that I was focused on staying alive but I was not living! I decided to live. I would work, although I would not pay myself for such efforts, but would make moves toward establishing an investment or non-profit structure that would offer me just enough in dividends or management fees to offset what disability pay I might qualify for. I would simplify my life even further to make more time for working with others, meditation, the world of streams, deep woods and languages of wind; I would open myself up to the possibilities of a social life which I had avoided. At present, I am beginning to manifest all of those changes. Which returns me to what has changed.

STOP! The story of my life has changed. It was, as are all the stories we make up about ourselves, mutable to begin with but I had failed to realize that. The wisdom of Thomas Szas has come home: “The self is not something one discovers, it is something one creates.” The self I am recreating gets honest more quickly, is more tolerant of the deceits I see manifest in human existence, and is focused more on living a life of service than staying alive and waiting to see what I will do if I live. Silence is more a daily part of my life as I practice a form of Buddhist meditation called Za Zen; physical exercise, which I had avoided out of fear of injury, is now manifest as a way of making myself stronger and more useful to others. The story of my life is just that, a story, and I see it from a bemused place of detachment, a form of what writers have dubbed “infotainment,” that teaches and entertains. Where, what and who I am becomes less relevant than what I am being at any given moment. I like this story and will continue to observe and report on it. I invite anyone who cares to do so to submit their stories for possible inclusion in a community of stories that might help us all to be of service to one another.

In Love, Light and Mystery, C.W. Metcalf

The phrase has led me to see myself as an abstract work of art, and to realize that any life is a work of art. Human lives are self portraits with numerous, unintended elements: the winds of change blow a paint can over, and abruptly our canvas is spattered; there is an earthquake of great emotional magnitude, and the canvas topples, creating a smeared edge; there are periods of joy which lead to grand arcs of color, and there are periods of pain that show themselves in dark blacks and browns, sometimes ripping gauges in the portrait we are creating.

Some days I am Picasso, and my life is a cubic confusion of shapes and twisted embodiments of humanity, which delight and confuse me. Other days I am a Zen composition by Mark Rothko, rendered in simple colors and shapes that bring me peace. Even on darker days I am Pollock’s Lavender Mist: Number 1, 1950, with shades of lavender and white promise glimmering through the blackness.

I am preparing to return to my speaking work, road trips and audiences composed of artists whose life canvases have been shredded by the new, Global Community of terrorism. My intention is to grant everyone I meet a new understanding of how to control the palette of colors and shapes they use to create their self-portraits.

Finally, the way we choose to live our lives is the greatest artistic challenge we face. Should we choose shades of fear, misery, desire and egotism, we will leave behind an attic full of shame and death. If we work with the hues of altruism, community, humor, imagination and Divine Luck, we will leave a legacy of joy in the gallery of souls we have known and loved.

I wish you all the broad canvas of Light and Hope.

C.W. Metcalf