Rejoining myself

Discombobulate is one of my favourite words. It sounds just like it feels.

To be discombobulated is to have lost your sense of balance or perspective - to have, metaphorically, lost your head; become disorientated, confused.

I think I spent the first few weeks of 2025 in a state of mild to middling discombobulation.

Christmas was great. The freedom to enjoy it without the effects or spectre of treatment was a relief. Having 14 people for Christmas dinner at relatively short notice - us six plus Lisa's side of the family - was a joy.

But January has been weird. Of course, there's the comfort of being able to hibernate and not having to head to work in the dark, like in previous Januarys. Yet, even that felt strange when I was the only one in the house (not) doing it.

I have realised that, increasingly, I am caught between two stools (bowel cancer pun not intended). Canadian author Kate Bowler, herself diagnosed with Stage 4 bowel cancer when she was 35, gave shape to my vague feelings in a recent podcast with UK writer Oliver Burkeman. Bowler explained how we spend life in Normal Time and/or Tragic Time. Normal Time is our everyday, default life with its ups and downs. Tragic Time is when things take a severe turn for the worst - the death of a loved one, being made unemployed, a serious illness etc. In Normal Time, we rely on our own resources and relate to others as we usually would. In Tragic Time, our life reduces to what is needed to get through - often with a higher reliance on others' help and a narrowed focus on key life-sustaining activities.

For me, Tragic Time began with my diagnosis in Easter 2023 and continued, in its obvious form, until my cancer stabilised and I came off chemotherapy at the start of summer 2024. In this mode, we were reliant on the support of others, both medical professionals and friends and family. I was receiving a lot more than I was giving out, as my body and mind dealt with the emotional jarring of incurable illness and the physical toll of treatment.

On the surface at least, balance has been restored in the past eight months. My physical health has largely returned and my life has felt less under immediate threat of ending, despite the cancer still being lodged in my bowel, bones and several other bits of my body.

It's felt like, for me at least, Normal Time has come back. This, as is often the case, has crystallised in my running. After achieving and exceeding my 50-mile charity target for September, I continued to put the miles in with the aim of running 500 miles in 2024, which I hit just after Christmas. When I reflect that five months of the year were spent on chemo, this was a wonderful milestone.

But already, as I started 2025, I was beginning to think about how I could run further this year and, more tellingly, comparing my performance to other runners I know. This was a subtle shift from every mile ran with cancer being a bonus, to the renewal of a pressure to keep up with my peers. It was Normal Time returning but not in the most helpful, or realistic, way.

Another example of Normal Time's presence is the niggling, subconscious, sense of guilt and listlessness I've been feeling for not going back to work (the fact I don't have a job to return to is beside the point!). Although I'm still enjoying volunteering at Oxfam, seeing people socially and keeping our tribe fed, I have more spare time than I used to. But I also know that, in reality, returning to full-time work is no longer 'on the table', or desirable, in the remaining time I have - the sense of Tragic Time still lingering. So, discombobulation.

This gently came to a head (literally) at the start of last week. Myself and Lisa spent a lovely long weekend in Stirling at the home of our friends Helen and Mike, enjoying delicious food, walks and scenery (the four of us pictured with The Kelpies - giant steel horse-heads near Falkirk - below). The Monday after we got home I went for a leisurely run and then began to notice a familiar pain in the right side of my neck, traveling up the back of my head. There's a small tumour at the base of my neck, on the right, so this pain is not unusual. But I hadn't felt it with this intensity since I began chemo over 18 months ago. It was painful enough to wake me each time I turned over in bed.

Partly due to the neck discomfort (and Storm Éowyn clattering over our street's bins), last Friday and Saturday mornings I found myself awake before dawn, lying in bed and pondering life in a way I haven't for a long time. This reminded me of the precious, and sometimes difficult, middle-of-the-night wide-awake stints I had while on steroids during chemo treatment. It was often in these moments that I would process my thoughts and emotions, listen to helpful podcasts or moving music in my headphones, sometimes in tearful prayer, occasionally overwhelmed by thankfulness. However hard they were, I felt very alive in those luminous early mornings.

Last Saturday morning in bed, I randomly switched to an episode in the long-running BBC Sounds' Soul Music series, which documents the impact of a single, usually famous, song on individuals' lives. Its subject was Sir Karl Jenkins' classical piece 'Benedictus' from The Armed Man, originally dedicated to the victims of the 1998-9 Kosovo War. I felt something melt inside me as I listened to the song and heard the stories of those it had affected. An ex-soldier described the solace he found in 'Benedictus' when on the verge of suicide with PTSD, after witnessing the human toll of war in Kosovo, Iraq and Afghanistan. A hospital chaplain, who worked on COVID wards, clung to the song when in isolation as he was given hours to live after his body collapsed with the virus.

Somehow, these stories softly re-opened my doorway to Tragic Time. As bizarre as it sounds, I'd grown faintly nostalgic for the period I was on treatment. Not the mental and physically disabling affects of chemo, but the routine and sense of purpose - and the feeling that things were being taken care of. Most of all, I'd missed the bursts of aliveness and brightness and vitality that, I guess, you only sense as death draws into view.

I've stopped watching the news recently. I watched a lot of it last year, with BBC Politics Live my regular lunchtime companion. But, even though I was once a journalist, the news is too much for me at the moment. So, I've switched to a slow binge of the BBC's Canal Boat Diaries. I often run along canals (recent picture of a frozen canal junction near Brownhills above) and I was hooked by the first episode which journeys through the canal junction at Fradley where Macy works (in its cafe). The main excitement of each episode - other than genial host Robbie Cumming occasionally falling overboard - is the opening, and closing, of numerous locks.

Locks allow boats to travel up, or down, hill by raising and lowering water levels in enclosed chambers. I've a growing sense that the discombobulation I've felt recently can be eased by allowing the flow of Tragic Time back into the waters of Normal Time, restoring some sort of equilibrium and settling me on a more realistic, maybe somehow more hopeful, course. It's not that I want to live fully in Tragic Time again (although I know I will, as we all will) but I don't want to be separated from its wise influence either. I still need to be able to access and allow its flow into my life, so it can teach, guide, soften and re-root me.

I ran again this week after seven days off, and my body feels fine. Yet, this fresh pain in the neck taught me a lesson. It enabled me in a small but important way to look back, and rejoin myself, permitting some strands of reintegration of Tragic and Normal Time.

The American poet Wendell Berry, whose words I sometimes turn to on my phone when tempted to doom-scroll, throws this light on it:

We travelers, walking to the sun, can’t see

Ahead, but looking back the very light

That blinded us shows us the way we came,

Along which blessings now appear, risen

As if from sightlessness to sight, and we,

By blessing brightly lit, keep going toward

The blesséd light that yet to us is dark.

(From This Day: Collected And New Sabbath Poems by Wendell Berry).