Alright, it was my intention to not turn this blog into an online journal, but after listening to an NPR interview about blogging, I decided it might be a good thing after all. So, I'm going to try to post more frequently and there won't be any restrictions on what I'm going to say.
This morning, on the bus, I was reading a few passages from Lance Armstrong's book It's Not About The Bike. I thought I would post a few paragraphs that I really liked:
Beyond that, I had no idea where to draw the line between spirtual belief and science. But I knew this much: I believed in belief, for its own shinging sake. To believe in the face of utter hopelessness, every article of evidence to the contrary, to ignore apparent catastrophe - what other choice was there? We do it every day, I realized. We are so much stronger than we imagine, and believe, when all along we humans know that nothing can cure the briefness of this life, that there is no remedy for our basic mortality, that is a form of bravery.
Without belief, we would be left with nothing but an overwhelming doom, every single day. And it will beat you. I didn't fully see, until the cancer, how we fight every day against the creeping negatives of the world, how we struggle daily against the slow lapping of cynicism. Dispiritedness and disappointment, these were the real perils of life, not some sudden illness or cataclysmic millenium doomsday. I knew now why people fear cancer: because it is a slow and inevitable death, it is the very definition of cynicism and loss of spirt.
