Most of us think about our health a lot more when something goes wrong.
That’s pretty normal.
A diagnosis gets our attention.
Pain gets our attention.
Suddenly we care about sleep, food, movement, stress and all the other things we were too busy to think about last Tuesday.
Peggy and I have thought about this differently since her cancer diagnosis.
Because when that day came, we couldn’t go backward and prepare for it.
The preparation had already happened.
For years.
We Didn’t Know What We Were Preparing For
Peggy had been moving and teaching for years.
She ate well.
She took care of herself.
She had strength.
She had people around her.
Then came Non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma and chemotherapy.
We would never claim those habits prevented cancer. Obviously they didn’t.
And we can’t know exactly how much they affected her treatment or recovery.
But I can tell you what we watched.
Peggy kept moving.
She kept teaching when she felt able.
She remained remarkably capable through a very difficult stretch of life.
And somewhere along the way we started using a word for what we’d been building all those years.
The fortress.
Not something that makes you invincible.
Something that gives you more to work with when life gets hard.
