Essentialism

A little health update to start. I passed out last Friday. I was rushing to get out of bed, get the kids to school, and get to work. I woke up feeling awful- I knew I had a high temperature and my throat felt like sandpaper, but I wanted to get moving in a hurry. I went to the bathroom to get the day started and began to take my temperature. That’s when I passed out.

When I came to, Paige was telling me to move. I had passed out in a perfect sitting position (no falling injury) and was blocking the door. She got me a cold washcloth and ordered me back to bed, wisely. I would not be taking the kids to school or going to work.

Paige and I were both fearing a Christmas at the hospital and potentially cancelling a lot of holiday plans. And even worse portents.

I ended up at the Cancer Center later that day. They got me on an IV with fluids. The labs didn’t say much so they gave me some more steroids (through the IV) and a prescription for an antiboitic. Those IV fluids were freezing! I spent the rest of the day recovering and resting. I was ordered to return Sunday morning for more lab work to ensure that I was okay.

Fortunately, I woke up feeling very good Saturday. When I started to get out of bed, Paige wisely advised me, “Sit straight up in bed for 2 minutes before you stand up.” I did, and everything went fine. I was evening driving Saturday, which surprised both of us. We were driving to lunch, per our usual Saturday routine, and I mentioned, “Oh, look. I’m driving.” “Oh yeah, you are. Good thing you’re feeling better.”

My labs Sunday came back with good results. I’m not sure what is was, maybe something viral. It wasn’t the flu. But it was a strange way to slide into the week of Christmas.

Thankfully, as long as things keep going smoothly, I’ll be spending it close to family.


In a way it’s fitting that I’m writing about this book, Essentialism by Greg McKeown. Instead of focusing on my health and well-being (something critical, essential) I was chasing down a daily routine and checklist (non-essential).

I came by this book sometime last year, before my surgery, diagnosis, and treatment. But it’s really stuck with me. The book speaks for itself, and if you’re not grabbed by the excerpt I’m posting then move on, I suppose. But one thing McKeown does emphasize as important to essentialism is something highly underrated in our adult culture and society, creative play.

This can take different forms for everybody. In Stillness is the Key, Ryan Holiday talks about Winston Churchill being a “mediocre painter and a worse bricklayer”, but those leisure activities helped restore his energy and give much needed respite in the most tumultuous times of his political career. It helps explain why ambitious people have (unrelated) hobbies. It supports McKeown’s assertion that creative play is critical to essentialism.

For me, it’s video games. I like to get lost in them. But I don’t get carried away, and being a father doesn’t allow me. I also am a big LEGO enthuiast. I believe that a $50 LEGO set put together by an adult in solitude can perhaps be the most inexpensive form of therapy available. I’m also known to get a bit too into coloring sheets or painting pottery at kids’ parties sometimes. I think someday I’ll graduate from video games into gardening. Maybe.

Once I was talking about video games with a friend (who also plays) and someone in our group exclaimed, “I don’t have time for games!” Well, if it’s not games then I hope it’s some form of creative play like painting or bricklaying.

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Walk with Me

Image from Walk with Me.

There is a documentary currently on Netflix called Walk with Me. It’s about a commune in Plum Village, France when Thich Nhat Hanh (author of Living Buddha, Living Christ) resided there. (Hanh has since moved back to his home country of Vietnam.)

The pace of the documentary is slow and deliberate. There is seldom any dialogue. Occasionally, there will be a scene depicting something in nature with a voice over from Benedict Cumberbatch. He is reading from Hanh’s collection of early journals, Fragrant Palm Leaves. I read somewhere that Cumberbatch took on this work as part of his preparation for the Dr. Strange movie he was cast in.

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The Darkness

Photo by icon0.com from Pexels

[Preface: I received my PET scan results this week. It looks all good. I still have a small nodule in my bottom right lung but it continues to shrink. Otherwise, no spread of the disease. So the healing continues to go well. Thank you all for your thoughts, prayers, and positive energy.]

I think I’m inadvertently starting a series of posts on a topic. Last week I wrote about Addiction and Recovery. Today I’m writing about darkness.

Some people suffer seasonal depression around this time of year. I never understood that before, but I am feeling it acutely this year. I’m also feeling a bit of survivor’s guilt. Which, for me, is wrongly named. It should be squander’s guilt. I don’t feel bad about surviving– I feel bad about looking back and thinking I should have accomplished more with this time that I didn’t even know I would have back in April.

Writing it out, I can see that I’m putting the intention in the wrong place with that feeling. It shouldn’t be about accomplishment, it should be about practice and love– which I try my best to engage in daily. But somehow, especially this time of year, it doesn’t feel like enough.

I heard something last year that put a radical spin on my understanding of this dark time of year, the season that the church refers to as Advent. The following text is from the Rob Bell (a spiritual writer) podcast, called the RobCast. This episode is called Darkness and Hope but I’m focusing on the darkness here. If you’d like to listen to it in its entirety, it can be found here. The podcast is an interview with Alexander Shaia, who has a background in anthropology, studied under Joseph Campbell, and is from Birmingham, Alabama. After listening to this, and finding this again this year, I need to read more of this guy.

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