This morning we are enjoying a much needed morning of quiet. During our days at the hospital last week we were able to find a palatable rhythm of meds that seems to keep the pain at bay and help Steve to feel more present and rested. We have added an 'anti- anxiety' pill to his roster which leads me to wonder when/if I will need one.
At this point I am finding hours of solitude and quiet as my anti-anxiety drug. If I can just have a 4-6 hour stint of sleep and a morning of quiet I am back on my feet, open to the day, feeling resilient and grateful. My friends have promised to tell me when they think i might need something stronger.
I was surprised to read the following in the book that Steve gave me for Valentine's this year, A Year with Rilke. I do not understand it all, but I agree with the last sentence and have found it true and fortifying as I learn to navigate in this foreign land of 'cancer.'
"It seems to me that all our sadnesses are moments of tension that we feel as paralysis because we can no longer experience our banished feelings. Because we are alone with the unfamiliar presence that has entered us, because we feel momentarily abandoned by what we've believed or grown accustomed to; because we can't keep standing as the ground shifts under our feet. That is why the sadness passes over like a wave. The new presence inside us, that which has come to us, has entered our heart, has found its way to its innermost chamber, and is no longer even there - it is already in our blood. And we don't know what it was. We could easily be persuaded that nothing happened, and yet something has changed inside us, as a house changes when a guest comes into it. We cannot say who has entered, we may never know, but there are many indications that the future enters us in just this way, to transform itself within us long before it happens. That is why it is so important to be alone and attentive when you are sad: because the seemingly uneventful and motionless moment when our future steps into us is so much closer to life than any loud and accidental point of time which occurs, as it were, from the outside."
from Letters to a Young Poet by Rainer Rilke