The Map and the Guide

I found the treasure map the same week my doctor called and while I was sitting on the bedroom floor leaning against the frame of the bed, she said,

You have cancer.

S&#t, I thought, then repeated it several times.  The doctor has already hung up and I was still holding the phone in my hand. 

I just found I have cancer and I am all alone here. I couldn’t even cry. 

Immediately after that, I remembered the map. The treasure map and the narrow treasure hunting path that starts with a shipwreck. It certainly was a shipwreck of sort, for sure an end of one journey – the life as I knew it pre-cancer – and the beginning of another.  There was no going back and staying on the wreckage-ridden shore wasn’t really an option.

The narrow path leading away was an obstacle course of one challenge after another.  Jumping over Niagara Falls…. Swimming across lake with the Loch Ness…  Treasure or no treasure at the end of the path, it became abundantly clear that I don’t have what it takes to brave this journey.

I am not strong enough.

I am not courageous enough.

And the map, that was supposed to give me ‘heads up’ and encouragement along the way proved to be a handicap and a hazard.  It was overwhelming.  

Just as life, at times, is beyond words overwhelming.

I can’t follow this path that takes me through the ambivalent landscape of poisonous healing, across the rickety bridges of toothless hope and besides sleeping monsters of despair.  I don’t know if I have it in me to make the next step much less to complete the journey.

In some other world, at some other hour, I would analyze and theorize and sermonize, dissecting words like dead laboratory animals, splicing the meaning from the shreds of some second-hand experience.  But, today I couldn’t do it.  I just couldn’t do it.

Today, I realized that more than a map with a clearly laid out path before me, what I really needed was a guide.  I needed a reliable, experienced guide who knows the treacherous terrain first-hand. I need a guide whose authenticity, whose most desirable qualifications are verified not by his knowledge, or education or eloquence, but by his scars.

On this journey, it was slowly dawning on me, I have no use for a guide without a scar.