The Present Imperfect

"There are some things we can change and some things we can't. It's okay that life isn't always getting better. We can have beauty and meaning, community and love, and we will need each other if we are are going to tell the truth. Life is a chronic condition, and there's no cure for being human."

                                                                            --Kate Bowler,  from the podcast  Everything Happens. 

March is one of those weird hybrid months that sits between actual seasons—neither fully winter nor truly spring, a tease of a month, restless, shifty. It's probably not a coincidence then, that my birthday happens to be in March, on the first day of spring, the twentieth. My mother reports that it snowed the day I was born almost six decades ago. This year the day was warm and sunny, nice enough for us to have a small gathering of family and friends in the backyard, which was lovely. Now, on the last day of the month, the temperatures are dropping to below freezing as the winds rise.

I used to try to ignore my birthday—not because I worried about getting older, but because celebrating it seemed to me...self-aggrandizing and maybe a little childish. Oh, I love going to other people's birthday parties, such jolly occasions, but as a grown human, I was never that comfortable with a fuss being made on mine. Sometimes there'd be a party, but if so, I'd give out that we were celebrating the vernal equinox, which just happened to coincide with my birthday. I took every trip around the sun for granted. But now, well, the big C. So these days, I'm definitely more grateful for another year on the books. Or in the blog. Whatever, I'm gonna honor it.

Birthday photo with weeping cherry

March, for me, is also the season of Lent. Even in the years between early adulthood and midlife, when I wasn't a regularly participating Catholic, Lenten observances still held meaning for me—fasting (no meat on Fridays), abstinence (giving up something) prayer (repentance), mercy, (charitable giving). Oh sure, we can engage in any of those things at any time, but to do so in community with others in this fickle between-season season, and to do so consciously, with intention, feels especially potent. In meditating on the brokenness of the world, the frailty and failings in our own selves, confronting our mortality, we're facing truth head on. Humanity exists in the present imperfect.

Truth: It's likely that I'll never not have cancer. My best hope, right now, is that treatments will advance enough so late stage cancer will be a chronic health condition kept in check with precision medicine. Even if something miraculous occurs that cures the cancer, in ever so many years, I'll have some other health issue to tend, and something else after that, and on and on until. It's hard not to be disgusted and frustrated with a body destined for failure, no matter how well (or how poorly) I care for it. Even though it all breaks down eventually, a human body is still a pretty wondrous thing, as is the soul inside it. For those of us who do have the luxury of aging, perhaps Lent makes human suffering a bit more present. Perhaps, as it deepens our empathy for others, it helps us find some for ourselves.