A December to Remember?

Well, it's Christmas.  It hardly seems possible that it is nearly the end of December. We celebrated a day early as Dad is off to New England today to celebrate my cousin's wedding. I had so many plans for this year, "(Wo)man plans and God laughs."  I was going to graduate, go to my cousin's wedding, maybe even take a celebratory trip. None of that happened. I've had to be content with watching from the side-lines (oh the joy of Facebook) and reminding myself to be grateful for what did go right this year.  It is never easy to realize you have limits. Delayed gratification? That takes patience; not really something I'm known for.  Strange as it may sound, my frustration concerning this year is less about having cancer and more about having to admit I couldn't do it all. "Once we accept our limits, we go beyond them" -Albert Einstein. Ah acceptance, some days that is easier than others.In other words, I'm still working on it.

The truth is I'm feeling better than I have in a long time. But with caveats (like you didn't know that was coming). I still have nerve pain in my back, my tummy scar still pulls, I swear my foobs swell in the cold weather, and my endurance is less than spectacular. I actually started going to the gym at work, and it's very sad how exhausted I get in 15 minutes.  Mika and I actually made it around the entire neighborhood today, a walk I used to do every morning. Now it's just on days I don't have to work as it is a much slower jaunt than it used to be.  I am trying to make peace with that; trying to not compare before and after. "We can never obtain peace in the outer world until we make peace with ourselves" - Dalai Lama. It is the season to reevaluate, and to give forgiveness.  Sometimes the hardest person to forgive is ourselves, even though there should be no need to forgive ourselves for being human. Why do we expect so much from ourselves and get so upset when we cannot obtain the impossible? 

“I don't know if I continue, even today, always liking myself. But what I learned to do many years ago was to forgive myself. It is very important for every human being to forgive herself or himself because if you live, you will make mistakes- it is inevitable. But once you do and you see the mistake, then you forgive yourself and say, 'Well, if I'd known better I'd have done better,' that's all. So you say to people who you think you may have injured, 'I'm sorry,' and then you say to yourself, 'I'm sorry.' If we all hold on to the mistake, we can't see our own glory in the mirror because we have the mistake between our faces and the mirror; we can't see what we're capable of being. You can ask forgiveness of others, but in the end the real forgiveness is in one's own self. I think that young men and women are so caught by the way they see themselves. Now mind you. When a larger society sees them as unattractive, as threats, as too black or too white or too poor or too fat or too thin or too sexual or too asexual, that's rough. But you can overcome that. The real difficulty is to overcome how you think about yourself. If we don't have that we never grow, we never learn, and sure as hell we should never teach.” ― Maya_Angelou" - Maya Angelou