Someone I love is fighting with cancer. I have therefore decided to make that person, their life, and their battle my priority over the next few months. Under the name “Tales of Life & Death,” I’ll be sharing more from this journey.
Over the past few weeks, ever since we learned about the disease, I have come to appreciate the way how everyone in my environment has been reacting to it.
In the midst of all the bad news, the only good news has been the way how both the patient, and the people around the patient (myself included) have decided to respond to it.
It’s not like a good attitude is going to make the cancer go away, but without that good attitude, all the ways you are trying to make the cancer go away, won’t be as effective. It’s like a good attitude is not the actual solution to the problem, but a core requirement for the actual solutions to work in the first place.
And at times, it feels that our positive, optimistic, can-do attitude is all that we have in. We don’t know how effective the chemo is, or how much time we will have with our loved one, but at least we know that we are not dwelling in bitterness but making the best out of the worst that we are facing.
In the words of Victor E. Frankl:
“Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms—to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.”