What Are The Rules Of The Game?

Sometimes you have to ask the hard questions and deal with the answers you think you ought to have or the ones that you don’t believe you deserve.

I know from experience what it means to be in the difficult positions in which you wander around wondering what the hell happened and how did you get to that place.

Sometimes I dive into a book, television show or movie to distract me and sometimes I go hit the gym and drive myself until my body refuses to cooperate.

That gets harder and harder to do because the recovery period grows longer and my days grow shorter.

Well, maybe not in a literal sense yet but sometimes it feels that way, but I am too stubborn to accept it so I look for lines in movies, books or music to push me a little bit farther.

Hell, sometimes TV themes from childhood work.

What Are The Rules Of The Game?

Text messages add to the joy of cancer.

They provide quick updates and snippets of information about partially collapsed lungs, pneumonia and other challenges but offer no idea about what is or isn’t normal.

What are the rules of the game?

What is common and what isn’t?

What sort of expectations should I have or not have?

I don’t know the answers to far too many questions and I sometimes struggle with that because I consume information in huge amounts with a decent amount of retention/understanding.

Except the consumption here leads to a belly ache because it is not the sort of thing you can easily make sense of.

There are so many variables and possibilities that make it hard to determine what is most significant and what isn’t.

So I take the rope inside my head and tie a knot at the end to rest my feet against and to use to grab a hold of hope.

Hope is the differentiator, the distinction and the difference maker.

Hope is the engine that drives the bus and sometimes hope seems hard to come by because we don’t know what the rules of the game are.

Not knowing makes it hard to evaluate what is significant and what is not. Instead of making a list and prioritizing we question because we don’t know where to start.

We can make some educated guesses, but the education is lacking so some of what we hope is that our educated guesses are tied into useful substance.

Fear has to be confronted, not ignored, but confronted and ideally mastered for just a few minutes, because sometimes that is all we need.

Pull Yourself Out

I share his own words with him decades after they were shared with me but unlike then there is no eye contact now.

There is no way to know if I am being heard and listened to other than that funny feeling in my gut.

What I think I know and what really is might be very different but I opt for the former and not the latter.

It is a reasonable guess based upon logic and decades of experience.

“I’d pull you out myself and carry you but that can’t be done. Doesn’t matter if you want it or if I want it.

My hands are tied here and if you want my help you are going to have to work for it. It will be worth it in the end, but you won’t know that for yourself unless you trust me.

So dig deeper and find that place. Doesn’t matter to me if it makes you angry, might even be better. Pull yourself out and I’ll help.”

Sometimes you play the long game and hope you played it right. Mostly you do it because it is how you find a way to sleep at night.