How a Friend with Cancer is Teaching Me Radical Acceptance and Joy

My Unexpected Journey to Live Life More Fully

If I’m lucky, I’m about halfway through my journey here on earth. As a 40-something who’s lived free from any major illnesses, I have the luxury of envisioning a long healthy life. Yet your 40’s are the period when you start seeing more and more friends and family diagnosed with cancer. One word that takes many forms. One word that reminds us all how fragile we humans really are.

For me, this lesson comes from my dear friend Meena.

She’s vibrant, she’s brave, she’s creative, she has an anything is possible attitude towards life, and she has cancer. Walks with Meena bring me to a place of accepting my own life sentence and force me to embrace the ever-present now that we so often take for granted.

As I walk through my mid-life, every day feels like a continual release of what was or what I imagined would be and an embrace of what is.

It’s a funny time. The feeling of your youth becomes more of a memory. You wish you could tell the 13-year-old you to always be fiercely herself. Encourage the 19-year-old you to go for her dreams. Whisper to your 27-year-old self that it’s all a bunch of bullshit, and the 37-year-old me to not be afraid of failure. So much potential wasted on thoughts of not being enough. Nights wasted crying because I didn’t live up to someone else’s idea of what my life should be. Years feeling like I was the only one not in on life’s great secret. Feeling like an outsider, worried, and anxious while the years slipped by.

Yes, your body is changing faster than the kids are growing. Friends get divorced. Parents die. And there’s a sudden realization that every moment we share with another is rare, sacred, and can change on a dime. We all know this, but something about shedding your own layers helps clarity come to pass.

Meena and I walk. We talk about life and we drink tea. She lets me be an active part of her kid’s lives and she’s married to a man who allows me to nerd out on public art for hours with him if we ever find the time. This is a family that clearly doesn’t have time for cancer.

Our walks are therapy. As much for her as they are for me. I am reminded to look around and see the beauty in nature when I’m with Meena. I walk head down like I’m in a hurry, while Meena reminds me to slow down, look around, and take it all in.

We laugh at the funny scenarios of life and all the simple things that connect us. We balance on the sides of train tracks as we share thoughts of joy. We share the satisfying things in life as well as the sacrifices we make along the way. We plot rogue art brigades and listen to good music. We connect through breathing meditations in the woods. We sit at the edge of the lake and let the sun warm our skin as we talk conspiracy theories. We watch baby bunnies and ducklings struggle to find their way and feel a connection to the great divine. We’re buddies. She’s a slice of heaven that shines bright in the world. And she has cancer.

Today on our walk we talked about radical acceptance. It reminded me of a quote I heard once in Kundalini, “Acceptance is the answer to all things.” Allowing her space to work through her own process of acceptance, my mind started to wonder if this conversation was helping me more than her.

I won’t pretend to understand what goes on in Meena’s head as she faces the possibility of not being alive to see her children grow up, about her mark on the world, about how unfair it all seems, or the frightening unknown that awaits us all. I don’t believe it is my journey to understand. What I do see is a strong woman who doesn’t outwardly focus on such negative thoughts. A woman who, through her cancer, is teaching me how to be a better human. Teaching me how to radically accept what is.

Through thought and action she shows me what pure joy is in every minute we’re together and I ask myself: who’s the one dying here?

I really love the life I have created for myself, and my hope is that you, the reader, can say the same, but it’s easy to forget all the abundance and beauty that follows us around day after day. It’s easy to let a day slip away without gazing at our beautiful mountains or sharing your mind with someone you love. It’s so easy to see an hour melt away in mindless social media scrolling. Getting wrapped up in the latest play of “Us vs. Them” tricks us into feeling less than, defeated, and alone.

After walks with Meena, I am reminded of the wealth that surrounds my life. After our walks, I never want to hop online, but rather I feel empowered to get busy working on my own life’s work. The good stuff like riding a bike with my honey or singing to my cats. Work on making my dreams my reality, and worrying less about what “they” have to say.

The joy and radical acceptance have been cancer’s gift to me. The thought of losing a friend in this reality is hard. It’s so rare we meet friends along our path that help you to see yourself more clearly, that encourage you, and support your crazy ideas. Selfishly I don’t want to lose that. That one word, cancer, has reminded me to live in the moment with those I love and radically accept them as a part of who I am so that it is understood that nothing is lost, yet there is so much to gain.

If you are in the midst of cancer, a survivor, or an ally, my wish for you is that you find peace, comfort, and space to recognize the messages cancer offers us all. To live more fully and present today so that you might see joy in every moment. Joy in your resilience, in your strength, in the people who surround you with love, and even in the pain as your body is screaming for understanding. We are all connected. You, me, Meena, all that have come before and all that follow behind. I find comfort in that and my sacred walks with Meena.