Live the Questions

It’s a scary thing to learn you have cancer and I have wondered every day since how this could have possibly happened to me.

A gut punch landed when I opened my Facebook feed a few days ago and saw beloved Anchorage cross country skier Kikkan Randall had posted a statement that she’s in treatment for breast cancer. Kikkan. Young. Strong. Vibrant. Successful. At the top of her game. Olympic Gold Medal top.

I have wondered every day since how this could have possibly happened to me.

Kikkan shared her story through a variety of outlets this week. She’s ready to fight. She knows how.  She is inspiration and courage. Always.

And yet in this moment our superhero is vulnerable.

Her question haunts me: How did this happen?

The impulse to connect dots is reflex. We need to make sense out of our circumstances. We watch others work through their troubles and we hope to avoid similar fate, if only we can know how this happened.

I remember how my first miscarriage sent my mind reeling in the sudden shift of expectations and plans (+it was a hormone roller coaster). The doctor sat there with us, quiet and generous with his words and time. You didn’t do anything to cause this, he said.

Cause and effect is a real thing. Of course it is. And choices matter. But sometimes the car comes around the corner and slams into you.

I have wondered every day since how this could have possibly happened to me.

Sometimes there is no good answer.

From the book of Ecclesiastes —No one can comprehend what goes on under the sun. Despite all their efforts to search it out, no one can discover its meaning. Even if the wise claim they know, they cannot really comprehend it.

And for that, the question my therapist puts to me so often: That being true. How are you going to live?

“Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books that are now written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.”    –Rainer Maria Rilke

Rooting for Kikkan in the race of her life.  

And learning to live the questions.