"This coming year, I want to live"

What do New Year resolutions mean? Nothing, I have discovered, unless you resolve your old year’s first. In September I was diagnosed with colon cancer and since then, I’ve had time to think about time. It seems as though my past years have collapsed, one after another, one into the other, until I can see my experiences both all at once and as a long train of hours. Everything I’ve been has brought me to where I am now. I must look backwards to move forwards.

I am not dying, yet I think much more about mortality. According to certain Eastern traditions, at the moment of death there occurs an unravelling — one revisits one’s life in reverse, unspooling from the Now into the Before, like a movie with the production credits rolling first. It is said that certain Tibetan masters even un-whirl as a ‘rainbow body’ — their decaying physical form spiralling off in a spectrum of colours, a kind of transcendental disco ball.

I think that, given another 1,000 years or so, I might perhaps manage to expire in the mild glow of a pale orange. Still, unenlightened though I am, my current situation has forced me to see things that I have stubbornly resisted seeing. Quite simply, my past years have not been what I thought they were.

Cancer doesn’t make your life slow down. Instead, it puts you on the fast track — you have to decide, very quickly, what matters and what doesn’t. Pleasure and pain take on new faces. On the surface, it would seem that pain is having to go for chemotherapy or landing in hospital, intravenously fed with salts and other people’s blood. Pain is surveying your body and the bruises and scars that now appear on it. Most stingingly, pain is laughing with dear friends, only to feel the pang of realising that nothing lasts forever.