LOSING

“Ma’am, I’m sorry to have to tell you this.... We’re not sure yet, but if this does turn out to be metastases... There’s nothing more we can do. The estimated life span after diagnosis ... it won’t be more than a year.”

We have always been taught to think ahead, to make plans. What do you want to study, what would be your dream job, what do you want to be when you grow up? We are faced early on with questions focused on the future, we believe in its malleability, we believe in grip. But what if all of a sudden, the future is not that certain anymore?

When do you have grip? And what is it exactly that we are trying to get hold of? What am I trying to obtain, to hold on to it as though it were mine… control? Life gave me a wake-up call: it does not exist. And if it does, it sure does not belong to me.

We want to steer, to be in charge: we want to have a plan. Holding on to this illusion until life interrupts it and, as unpredictable as she can be, takes that plan and smashes it into pieces. Broken up into new possibilites, chances and opportunites you never saw before, or just broken and perished. Accidents, sickness or merely bad luck. What is left? Despair is derived from the Latin word ‘sperare’, which means ‘to hope’ But I am not sure what it is, that I would be hoping for.

What to do, in such a final year? What to do with the uncertainty, regardless of whether this year is the last? Days went on and weeks passed and I felt like an outsider to the world, an observer. As if I were standing in the eye of a storm, in a deafening silence, watching people fly around in this hurricane of meaningless hustle. They raced around me, with busyness and worry, about themselves and about others, about everything and about nothing. About now, but mostly about later.

Always later

Abruptly kicked out of this storm, I stopped participating for a while. Why all these worries? What does ‘now’ mater, without later? I later found out that it was how Gautama began his Buddhistic journey: “What is the meaning of life when existence is so transitory, so uncertain and so full of sorrow?” There I was standing, as small as could be, in this new nihilistic world and I lost my grip.

Certainty, that is what we are all longing for, what we are trying to grasp. Paradoxically, the only certainty in life turns out to be uncertainty. There is nothing but change, nothing we can actually hold on to, and that is the only certainty life can give. Thus,

We can chase something intangible, but never grasp it. No one knows what is later, what comes later and whether later will come. It frightened me at first, letting go. Daring to accept the incertitude. But I found out that this realisation does not make living any less important, it is just all there is. On the contrary, it makes every moment count even more, being grateful for that ‘all’ that just is.

I would not want to ask you what you want to become later, but who you’d want to be right now. It is the only thing we can grasp, our own perception of grip. I lost mine, and decided to leave the illusion behind for good.

Fearing the future, dealing with uncertainty, losing grip - this is my story, but I think many of us share the feeling. Especially in this early stage of our lives as students with this big empty future in front of us, exciting yet frightening. The fear could even be caused by all the possibilities in today’s society: the world at your feet, unsure of what to do with all these choices and terribly afraid of the ‘wrong’ ones. But as it turns out, even a completely mapped out future would not give any certainty. There I also found peace in acceping change as the only constant in this life. Constant motion and living in the present, for accepting to lose grip is what comes closest to having it. //

At the beginning of this year, pantheon// held a writing contest with the theme ‘losing grip’. This article, written by Lizette Wentzel, has been selected by the comittee to be published in the magazine. Other submitted articles will be published on pantheon online soon. We thank Lizette and the other participants for their contribution.