We don’t know what’s coming… and that’s a gift.

Hello everyone!

As we greet the passing of one year and look to the next, I wish you prosperity and peace and support in challenges faced.

My highlights of 2021 included receiving notes from readers of my book How to Hold a Cockroach, producing and publishing the spectacular audio version (check it out!), coaching wonderful clients, completing a year of living near family in Utah and spending the last half of this year visiting loved ones all over the country. Some challenges for me included supporting a friend who was hospitalized with a scary illness, contracting Covid, and being with the long-term fatigue and brain fog symptoms that have followed. All of it has created opportunities to practice patience, gratitude, compassion, and presence.

This year marked the 25th anniversary of my remission from cancer. I was diagnosed with Hodgkin’s lymphoma at the age of 14, just as high school began. The nine months of treatment that followed were very difficult. The effects of chemo and radiation caused tremendous pain: days of bedridden nausea, surgeries, medications that tasted awful, invasive tests, and an array of side effects so graphic that I’ll spare the details! And at times when I was sick in bed, everyone else seemed to be enjoying more typical lives without me. It was a lonely and difficult time.

Fortunately, the treatments were effective, and the tumors dissolved. On the day we celebrated remission, present to how sick and lonely I had been, I told my parents: “If I ever get this again, I will die from it. I will never go through that again.” I believed that recovery was not worth such suffering. And, at the time, it really seemed true.

Now, I look back at the wild range of surprises that have followed: the love, pleasure, connection, adventure, surprises, fun, and peace; incredible relationships; and even the unexpected losses and challenges. There is such deep gratitude to that brave teenage boy for his courage and willingness to bear suffering in the hope of better days to come, gratitude that he made the choice to persist so that I could enjoy being here now. And there is reverence for those I’ve known whose treatment has not resulted in the extension of life I was gifted. With the benefit of hindsight, I know that if I were faced with a scenario like that again, I would be afraid but I would do it without hesitation, because I have experienced the unimagined opportunities that come to those who continue to choose life.

If you need to hear this, please hear it: when life seems dark, filled with pain or suffering, or when your loneliness seems too much to bear, remember that you don’t know what’s coming. Some of what comes may be filled with challenge, and some of it may be beyond your brightest imagining: joy, grace, and delight beyond anything you’ve known. We don’t know what’s coming, and that is a gift! The good, the bad, the challenge, and the cherries on top. If you’re currently in the darkness, hang in there. Light will come. And if you’re in the light, savor it.

With love,
Matt