Lately I've been pushing people and activities away from me. I worry that I might have offended people by backing out of my activities. I'm hoping and praying that people will understand my need to have some space to regroup. I've heard about people who realized after their cancer how important it was to take life easier and enjoy things at a slower pace. I seem to have done the exact opposite. I committed myself to a number of activities, and kept piling and piling things on top of them. It's as though I've been in a sort of psychotic frenzy to live my life to the fullest -- or more like to overflowing and bursting. It wasn't a problem until last weekend when I was fighting off an infection, and thinking "the cancer's back", and then I got on the scale and saw that I was still gaining weight on top of the 25 pounds I've already gained from my chemotherapy last year. It sort of hit me in the head that I've been sacrificing some other things that are very important to me in favor of doing things with my various groups.
My work is something that I actually see as part of my dharma practice, and a very important thing that I can do for John. I like the feeling that if something happens to me I can leave him with a certain degree of financial cushioning so that he's not burdened with losing a wife, plus having bills to deal with. I feel that there's good karma in my job. So when my work pressures build, I really want to give it 100% of myself. I enjoy my work, and I feel that it's important to do it well and with integrity and focus. My main problem is that the pressures are very intense sometimes, and I need to be careful to not be overly stressed-out.
If I had to pick the most important things to me for what I'd like to get done before I die, at the very minimum, it would be to give John financial stability, to try to give some compassion to someone in need, and to leave a written legacy of myself so that people can read it and maybe understand some things about life after cancer.
The second most important things are to get into shape physically and to continue meditating every day for as much and as long as I can, so that the person that I am from day to day is the best person that I can be.
I don't want to completely exclude other activities at all, but I just want to make sure they don't overwhelm my life to the point where I lose focus on what's important to me. I so love the people that I've met and worked with this year. Maybe the problem has been that they've been such an intense source of inspiration for me on how incredible people can be. A lot of the cynicism that I've felt throughout my life about people has changed in this past year. So I'm still defining this new person I call "me".
9:49:39 PM 
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