Happy New Year - and may it be a slow, long one

I've had a lovely Christmas, with a long break off work, and time spent with family and friends. Drank mulled wine. Ate mince pies and cream. Salvaged a turkey that was in the oven for 3.5 hours before I noticed that the oven was on a grill setting (and a low grill setting at that).

But it's also been the Christmas when I've struggled with one of the after effects of having had cancer, one which seems to be getting worse as time goes by. I find it very hard to put into words, and the best I can do is to say that it's the opposite of what I wrote about in this post. But it's vaguer. I can't put my finger on it. If I was making a film, I'd have myself looking in a mirror, stretching out a finger to trace my features, and then the image in the mirror dissipating into vapour, with a mocking laugh as she disappeared.

It boils down to a re-figuring of the shape of life, in terms of time. That happens as we get older, and we all struggle with it. You can tell that by the ridiculous way we are constantly surprised by the normal steady beat of time. We express amazement when another year passes by. When we have a birthday or anniversary that ends in a 0, we say "how can that be?" In our hearts, we're all 23 year olds. We bore the children of our friends by talking about how they've grown. Of course they've grown! Duuh! It would be odd if they hadn't. Somehow we all feel we're fighting against the passage of time. Perhaps when you've had cancer, that rational knowledge - the clock is ticking and life is finite - passes into lived experience. I don't like it.

What's changed for me is that a little note of urgency has been added. It's only little. It's imperceptible most of the time. But it's there. And it's got a grim irony, because the more you feel you need to be making the most of time and holding onto it, the more time slips away from you.

I find it hard to relax. I plan things, and they're nice, and I do them, and then I want to move on to the next thing. Perhaps I want to create that memory, tick that box, and then make sure I get on with the next one. You never know how many boxes will fit into the timeline, and you want to get as many of them ticked off as possible.

I find it hard to be in the moment. This is a modern day complaint, isn't it? I'm sure many of you will identify with this. I read articles on Mindfulness, and I totally believe in the value of it. But I can't do it. (So please don't leave me any handy hints in the comments.) I'm always thinking about what needs to get done. I have a false sense that when I've done everything, then I'll be able to relax and smell the roses. But I know that I'm never going to get to the bottom of the list. It's not even a real list, where I can tick things off. It's just a ghostly feeling of a list, that's always there. I've had periods of my life, long ones, where I've understood that you don't wait to smell the roses, that the roses are all there along the way releasing their sweet perfume if you'll only understand that the point is to smell them as you go. But at the moment, I can't seem to do that.

I build time into my life in positive ways. I go to yoga once a week, I walk the dog, I have hot baths, I spend regular time with people who energise me. But I still feel the tightness of the Time Thief on my back. He feels like he's got a large clothes peg, which he puts over the vertebra at the bottom of my neck. It hoicks my shoulder blades up and in. That peg seems to be there, and tighter, more and more.

I once picked up a leaflet which talked about the after-effects of cancer. On the list of after-effects it mentioned "a fore-shortened sense of life". It was such a relief to read that. Yes. Those words summed it up perfectly. It's always such a moment of comfort and sustenance to feel "I'm not the only one - this is a 'thing' - this is normal". I'm grateful for that leaflet, but it didn't tell me what I could do about it. So I've made myself a little word-joke, and I think of myself as living "life on the foreshore", but I'm a bit stuck as to what I can do to get myself a little further back onto dry land. (Please don't recommend a book on Mindfulness at this point.)

Postscript: In the writing of this post (how awesome is the process of blogging?), I realised that, since this is a 'thing' and since I'm not the only one, there must be wisdom out there about it. So I've googled my local Maggie's, and I'm sure that is going to be a good place to start. It's so odd that I haven't thought of that before. My local Maggie's is a 5-minute walk away, and of course it's the obvious resource. That's the thing about the Time Thief, though. He robs you, with his evil clothes peg, of the time and space you need to think about how to help yourself. He's a very clever devil. He must be clever because even Google can't pin him down (and Google can do pretty much everything). I googled "grinning devil with clothes peg" to see if I could find an image to end this post with, and it didn't throw up anything appropriate.