The Room That Changed Everything
There's a particular energy that fills a room when survivors, caregivers, and researchers gather in the same space. It's not pity. It's not fear. It's something far more powerful.
I felt it at the Sylvester Comprehensive Cancer Center's Survivorship Symposium at the University of Miami, where I had the honor of delivering the keynote. The room was filled with people who understood what it means to face the impossible and choose to keep going anyway. When collective focus and compassion come together like that, survivorship becomes more than survival. It becomes shared transformation.
These weren't just people enduring their circumstances. They were people discovering something profound within them, something that only emerges when you're forced to confront what you thought would break you. And in that room, I realized something I hadn't fully understood before: survivorship isn't a solo journey. It's a collective one.
The outliers, the long-term survivors, the so-called "exceptions to the rule," they become the way-showers for everyone else seeking a cure. They become proof that impossible is optional. And when we talk, share, and connect, we create pathways to healing that didn't exist before.
You Are the Universe Experiencing Itself
Alan Watts once said, "You are the universe experiencing itself." It's one of those statements that sounds simple until you sit with it long enough to feel its weight.
We spend most of our lives mistaking living for drifting. We believe life is happening to us instead of through us. We're like leaves floating down a river, everything calm and predictable, until suddenly the current picks up and chaos strikes.
In those moments, fear screams that the current is dangerous. That we need to fight it, control it, swim against it with everything we have. But what if the current isn't the enemy? What if the current is the way?
The river knows its course. It's been carving its path long before we arrived and will continue long after we're gone. The art isn't in controlling the river. It's in surrendering to its flow with awareness, not passivity. It's in recognizing that being alive is not a passive wish. It's an active participation in something far greater than ourselves.
The Spiral Path of Healing
Life, and survivorship especially, doesn't move in a straight line. It moves in spirals.
You'll revisit familiar challenges, old fears, recurring doubts. But here's what most people miss: you're never back where you started. Each loop of the spiral brings wisdom you didn't have before. You've evolved. You've learned. And now, you can offer guidance to others walking a path you once walked alone.
This spiral becomes the blueprint for collective healing. Your story becomes someone else's permission slip. Your survival becomes someone else's hope. Your willingness to face what hurt you becomes the map for someone still lost in the dark.
Four years post-diagnosis, I never imagined gratitude would be part of my story. Gratitude felt impossible when I was given seven months to live. Yet, gratitude became the key.
Cancer opened doors I never knew existed. Doors to scientists working tirelessly on breakthroughs. Doors to seekers asking the hard questions about meaning and purpose. Doors to survivors who became family in ways blood never could. What seemed like a devastating setback became the foundation of everything that matters now.
The irony isn't lost on me: what once felt like an ending became the beginning of everything.
Turn Toward What Hurts
If you're in the midst of your own setback or storm right now, I know how easy it is to focus on what's falling apart. The diagnosis. The loss. The dream that didn't come true. The relationship that ended. The plan that crumbled.
Turn Toward What Hurts
If you're in the midst of your own setback or storm right now, I know how easy it is to focus on what's falling apart. The diagnosis. The loss. The dream that didn't come true. The relationship that ended. The plan that crumbled.
But here's the truth that changed everything for me: real transformation begins when you stop running and turn toward what hurts.
I'm not talking about wallowing in pain or glorifying suffering. I'm talking about facing it. Looking it in the eye. Asking it what it came to teach you. Because within every difficulty, there's a seed of unseen possibility waiting to emerge.
Facing it is how you learn who you really are. Not who you thought you were. Not who others expected you to be. But who you are when everything else is stripped away.
The Art of Letting Go
Letting go doesn't mean quitting. It doesn't mean giving up or accepting defeat. Letting go means releasing control over how things unfold.
It's about trust, not passivity. It's about living with open hands and open eyes. It's about recognizing that you can't force the river to change its course, but you can learn to navigate it with grace.
To let go is to stop clinging to the version of life you thought you were supposed to have and embrace the one unfolding right in front of you. The one that's messy and uncertain and beautiful and terrifying all at once.
Being alive is the purpose. Everything else is commentary.
You are both participant and creator in this unfolding miracle. You're not a passive observer watching life happen around you. You're the one writing the story, even when it feels like the pen is being ripped from your hands.
Every Morning Is an Invitation
Every morning you wake up is another invitation to show up and live. Not to survive. Not to merely endure. But to live.
That is the miracle.
Hope isn't about wishing things were different. Hope isn't crossing your fingers and waiting for someone else to save you. Hope is about embodying the wish through action, presence, and gratitude.
Life is not a passive wish. It's a living, breathing dance between surrender and creation. Between letting go and holding on. Between accepting what is and reaching for what could be.
And you are the dancer.
So if you're reading this and you're in the middle of your own impossible moment, know this: You're not alone. Your story matters. Your survival matters. And the way you choose to show up today, right now, in this moment, it matters more than you know.
Because someone out there is watching. Someone is waiting for permission to believe that impossible is optional. Someone needs to see you turn toward the current instead of fighting it.
Be that person. Live that truth. Dance that dance.
That's the hope move. That's the miracle. That's life.
Reflection Prompt:
Where in your life are you still wishing for change instead of living it?
Turn Toward What Hurts
The Art of Letting Go
Letting go doesn't mean quitting. It doesn't mean giving up or accepting defeat. Letting go means releasing control over how things unfold.
It's about trust, not passivity. It's about living with open hands and open eyes. It's about recognizing that you can't force the river to change its course, but you can learn to navigate it with grace.
To let go is to stop clinging to the version of life you thought you were supposed to have and embrace the one unfolding right in front of you. The one that's messy and uncertain and beautiful and terrifying all at once.
Being alive is the purpose. Everything else is commentary.
You are both participant and creator in this unfolding miracle. You're not a passive observer watching life happen around you. You're the one writing the story, even when it feels like the pen is being ripped from your hands.
Every Morning Is an Invitation
Every morning you wake up is another invitation to show up and live. Not to survive. Not to merely endure. But to live.
That is the miracle.
Hope isn't about wishing things were different. Hope isn't crossing your fingers and waiting for someone else to save you. Hope is about embodying the wish through action, presence, and gratitude.
Life is not a passive wish. It's a living, breathing dance between surrender and creation. Between letting go and holding on. Between accepting what is and reaching for what could be.
And you are the dancer.
So if you're reading this and you're in the middle of your own impossible moment, know this: You're not alone. Your story matters. Your survival matters. And the way you choose to show up today, right now, in this moment, it matters more than you know.
Because someone out there is watching. Someone is waiting for permission to believe that impossible is optional. Someone needs to see you turn toward the current instead of fighting it.
Be that person. Live that truth. Dance that dance.
That's the hope move. That's the miracle. That's life.
Reflection Prompt:
Where in your life are you still wishing for change instead of living it?"Life is not a passive wish. It's a living, breathing dance between surrender and creation—and you are the dancer."
