The Year of Living Zestifully

I find that when I go on vacation, my body's natural inclination is to go to sleep at 12:30 a.m./1 a.m. and then wake up at 9ish. I was puttering around just after midnight when I realized it was a year ago today that I had to have Cookie put to sleep. Well let me be more accurate. I chose to have Cookie put to sleep. It was the first time where I was not reacting to a crisis with one of my cats, either trying to prevent death or getting over a sudden one. This was an altogether different space, a space in which I had the power to choose what would happen next.

And so I did and inevitably, the doubts that hindsight creates have appeared haphazardly ever since like the buses on an unreliable route. It's the decisions before the decision that haunt me. He was at the emergency vet for three days. Should I have taken him home? Yes I should have done this. He was lonely, he was scared. I accelerated the unavoidable outcome. I could have at least bought more time, time that would have been comfortable for him. No I shouldn't have taken him home. He was suffering. He couldn't breathe properly. He needed care until we knew exactly what we were dealing with. I was there when it counted, when Cookie let me know with a look that I was doing the right thing.

This event, as insignificant as it may seem to some, was the kick off to my 2007, to what was one the longest years of my life in all the best and worst ways. I had sensed for some time prior to it [and not without relief] that my life was certainly, finally, entering a period of transition. For too long, I had been in an unchanging wilderness of fatigue and denied dreams, crushed hopes and absent opportunity, seemingly impotent to change any of it. And this period felt so prolonged that when I sensed my own destiny was being handed back to me, I felt no unease. Something, anything unknown was better than what I knew, which is not something I can easily say about myself.

We are strange creatures in this respect, so doggedly hanging on to the certainty of knowing our circumstances, where things stand, what's what. It is our essential conundrum. Nature has made change vital to our existence and yet has bestowed us with an ingrained aversion to it. At times we are even repulsed by the prospect that what seems so real, so soaked in our very skin can and is subject to augmentation at any time - by people, by events, by illness, by the simple day-to-day of being alive. Yesterday was this. Today is now that.

I once read an article in Chatelaine about a female paramedic. The writer made a wonderful observation of his subject that his stayed with me ever since. He noted that despite the fact that his subject had seen and been through some awful things, she had emerged "burnished, not burned." That is the best you can ask for as you navigate through the valleys, peaks and benign flatlands of your existence, that your burnished, essential and hopefully better self continually emerges

That is what I hope for as I focus on trying to do and be better now that I am able to move forward. I can't let any aspect of myself stagnate. The best must be nurtured; the worst made better. I am learning that if I keep my focus on this principle, life hurts less or at least, its hurts are excised that much sooner and make their demarcation on my landscape, a reference point to visit later when I'm not sure what to do.

In some ways, I hope that 2008 isn't another variation of 2007. I had some incredible highs - getting cast in a show, getting paid as an actress, finally getting anemia and a vitamin deficiency diagnosed and getting better as a result of treatment, my mother's leukemia remission. But it had incredible lows as well - the relentless day-after-day, month-after-month of traversing the passive/aggressive minefield of my office, not getting the benefit of the doubt from friends when it counted the most, seeing my mother struggle through chemo and being powerless to relieve her of any of its effects.

There's a certain comfort in dullness, in a day or week where nothing of consequence happens. But that's not living and if 2008 does bring 2007's second act, so be it. I have learned enough now to know that you can't hold anything, that clenching your fist under a tap doesn't stop the water flowing down the drain.

Let it come. My aim is to be burnished and not burned. A little singed now and again, but not burned.

I hope.