[{"_1":2,"_40":-5,"_41":-5},"loaderData",{"_3":4,"_39":-5},"routes/_index",{"_5":6},"posts",[7,20,27,33],{"_8":9,"_10":11,"_18":19},"slug","2024-11-17-acceptance","attributes",{"_12":13,"_14":15,"_16":17},"title","Acceptance","month","November","year",2024,"html","

You are where you need to be. Or more specficially, you are where you are. It's a bit like saying \"it is what it is\", which alhought might seem super unhelpful, has actually come to be a hugely important part of my thinking recently.

For the past 112 days, with only a few day trips home, I've been in hospital. That's a long time. I've probably spent more than half of this year in hospital with \"complications\" from my bone marrow transplant back in January. It's fair to say it's been a tough year. But if there's one thing I've learned through this experience, it's that acceptance is everything.

\"I am where I need to be\" might be a lovely thought if you're sitting in the sun, drinking a martini and eating good food, but less so when you're in a dingy hospital room watching old episodes of Star Trek Voyager with nasty stomach cramps. This is not where I need to be, this is horrible, I want to be somewhere else, I want to be someone else.

On the hardest days, the thought of acceptance feels like surrender, like giving up. But I've come to understand that it's not about resignation, it's about being present. It's about acknowledging reality as it is, not as we wish it would be.\nMindfulness teaches us that suffering is an inevitable part of life. We amplify that suffering if we resist it. When we refuse to accept where we are, we create a layer of additional suffering that is totally self-inflicted.

Acceptance becomes easier when you realize, as George Harrison so aptly put it, that all things must pass. Nothing is permanent. Recently I had some truly terrible pain in both my knees, no one could work out what was going on and I needed a tonne of morphine. I was in absolute agony for about 24 hours. For some kinds of suffering a distraction can be helpful, but doom-scrolling Instagram isn't a solid strategy for coping with suffering, especially not the extreme-pain kind. Instead all you can really do is breathe, accept what is happening, and know it will pass, which of course it did.

All this doesn't mean I've stopped hoping for better days, but it does mean I'm trying very hard to not fight with reality. I resist the urge to wish I were somewhere else or even someone else. I hope that the future brings more good days than bad, but I will do my best to accept whatever hand is dealt.

Of course, some days acceptance is easier. When I do get to go home for a little while, those seemingly mundane moments are more wonderful than can be explained. I sit on the sofa with the dog, with the fire on. My partner is next to me, crocheting weird little characters and I watch people walk by the house. The world feels warm and whole. On those days, it's easy to say \"yes, I am exactly where I need to be.\"

I've spent a lot of my life trying to achieve something, trying to be somewhere, trying to have something. If I've learnt anything this year it's that there is no mythical place where everything is perfect. The closest you'll ever get to true peace is to accept where you are, fully and honestly.

And today? Today, I'm here. And that's enough.

",{"_8":21,"_10":22,"_18":26},"2022-12-news",{"_12":23,"_14":24,"_16":25},"News","December",2022,"

I thought it was important to know what is going on in the world, so I would start every day by reading the news. A bowl of granola and a nice hot mug of information. Knowledge is power after all, and who doesn't want to be powerful? Of course, you can't just read the news once a day. News is live. It's happening in real time, so you need to check in every few hours at least. When news arrives it's \"breaking\". An unstoppable destructive wave that sweeps away whatever dared to previously be considered important for a precious few rotations of the Earth. The vast majority of news is either objectively bad, for example wars or natural disasters, or just vaguely depressing. Scientists claim that the universe does in fact contain good news, but they're yet to build a particle accelerator big enough to prove it.

Level one of reading the news is knowing what is happening in the world. This is a good start as it separates you from the un-informed masses. Some people will stay at level one forever, just content with knowing that stuff is happening. Happy to slip off their shoes and dip their feet in the cool waters of current affairs, but no plans to get their hair wet. To progress to level two you have to ask a dangerous question - \"why?\". Why is this happening? What's the back-story, the history, the root cause? Playing level two is like a Choose your own Adventure book but using Wikipedia. You can also play level two using YouTube but then you instantly become a radicalised conspiracy theorist and you lose the game.

If you have a genuine interest in a topic, or it affects you in some way, then it's reasonable to know a bit about it. If it's related to your job or profession you might even be an expert on the topic. But you can't be an expert on everything. You can't know everything. It's too much. It will just consume you, occupying every waking thought and distracting you from the things that are real and right in front of you. Yes, it's important to know what is happening in the world, it's just not more important than what is happening to you, or around you, at this very moment. You also have to be careful not to confuse information with knowledge, or assume the former will always lead to the latter. To convert information into knowledge and ultimately wisdom, the brain needs to be in a position to assimilate it and process it properly. If you throw too much stuff at your brain when it's not ready for it, it still has to go somewhere, and that somewhere is the black hole.

The last couple of years have been pretty tough for me, and over this time I've become increasingly aware of the black hole that sits in my brain. As long as you stay far away from it and it remains small, it's harmless. But get too close and it starts to to pull you in. The more it pulls in the bigger it gets and the stronger it's pull becomes. There have been some moments where I have felt dangerously close to my black hole, but I have always been able to pull myself away. It's a hard sensation to describe, something like trying to walk up on the down escalator. What I've only realised recently is that I have been pouring huge amounts of raw material into my black hole, feeding it's growth. That's right… the news.

The news is generally bad, and bad news is dense and heavy. Black holes love big heavy things. Yum yum. Good news on the other hand is light and makes you feel warm and fuzzy inside. If there was an equal amount of good news and bad news maybe it would cancel itself out like anti-matter and matter annihilating each other on contact, but as previously established, the existence of good news is only theoretical. So there is just bad news, and loads and loads of it. An endless stream of misery and worry being poured directly into your brain.

I realise of course that I am not the first person to make a connection between spending too much time being concerned with things that don't affect you and bad feels. I'm reminded of the Father John Misty lyric from the 2015 song Holy Shit:

\n
It's important to stay informed
\n The commentary to comment on
\n Oh, and no one ever really knows you and life is brief
\n So I've heard, but what's that gotta do with this black hole in me?
\n

When we consider the briefness of our lives and the fact that even those closest to us can only know us so well, who gives a parrots beak about what someone we don't know thinks about something that doesn't affect us. This also isn't a 21st century modern-world thing, Thomas Gray, the 18th century poet wrote about how people are condemned to \"the tender of another's pain, the unfeeling for our own\" and how \"thought would destroy their paradise\". The poem ends with the often quoted line \"where ignorance is bliss, 'tis folly to be wise\".

And so, at least for a while, I'm going to try ignorance. I've stopped reading the news. I don't know what's going on anymore and it's quite lovely. My black hole is receding, shrinking, weakening. I look out the window into the garden and see the morning frost on the grass, the lonely fat pigeon perched on the edge of a bare branch. The sky is blue, the air is cold, it's a Thursday, it's December, the dog wants his breakfast. These are todays top stories.

Like many people I hope one day to feel wise, but maybe an important step towards that elusive wisdom is being able to just let stuff pass you by. To be comfortable not knowing things, not having the answers. To live blissfully in a thoughtless paradise.

",{"_8":28,"_10":29,"_18":32},"2022-10-three-months",{"_12":30,"_14":31,"_16":25},"Three Months","October","

It's August. I'm in hospital following my stem cell transplant. I'm exhausted but can't sleep. I'm not really hungry but even if I was my mouth hurts too much to eat. I have antibiotics by a drip every six hours, my vitals are checked every four. Walking the few meters to the bathroom is a struggle. I feel hollowed out. Boris Johnson is the Prime Minister.

It's September. I'm back home now but still very weak. I've managed a few walks around the block, possibly even a short walk in the forest. At work the team are in the south of France for a summer offsite. I am not. Life is something that is happening elsewhere, to other people. Instead of the vibrant colours of experience there are just smudges of grey. Liz Truss is the Prime Minister.

It's October. I'm feeling a lot better but still get quite tired and full of aches and pains. I feel old. Worn down by the weight of years I am yet to live. I'm spending a lot of time playing and writing music which is really keeping me going. I've been told that to further increase my chances of a full cure I should have some radiotherapy. Ok. Sure. What else is there to say. The timing of this will mean there is a reasonably good chance I won't be able to attend the winter offsite in December, which would be the third one in a row. We also had plans to travel to Seoul in December, but now that is a little uncertain. It feels like I only make plans so I have something to cancel. Rishi Sunak is the Prime Minister.

",{"_8":34,"_10":35,"_18":38},"2022-08-writing",{"_12":36,"_14":37,"_16":25},"Why is writing so hard?","August","

Why is writing so hard? It isn't for lack of things to write about and it isn't for lack of time. Something about staring at an empty text editor and a blinking cursor renders the brain incapable of turning thoughts into words no matter how long you devote to the act. If you can somehow manage to successfully convert some of your thoughts into words then more often than not you realise that the words don't come together to make a coherent sentence. The ability to create many coherent sentences and arrange them in such a way that they convey the thoughts you had in your brain is surely pure voodoo.

But maybe the issue isn't with the words or sentences, but with the thoughts in your brain. Maybe those thoughts aren't quite as well formed or structured as you thought they were and as a result can't be written down any more than you can take a photo of the wind. To be able to write thoughts down we need to confront them, untangle them, and understand them. We also need to separate the useful and interesting thoughts, where we learn new things things or make observations about the world around us, from the noisy and self-destructive ones (we all know which ones those are). It's possible to do this and not write anything down, but writing is clearly a good way of finding out how successfully you have organised the sock drawer that is your brain.

Historically, I have not been good at writing down my thoughts. I have tried at various times in my life to keep a journal or write blog posts but never managed to get into any kind of rhythm with it. One reason for this might be that I'm not very good at confronting my own thoughts. As it turns out confronting my thoughts is something I have been forced to do over the last year or so.

As a child I was often told that I \"moved too fast\". My parter regularly has to tell me I have gone into \"fast-forward mode\", meaning I have become overly-excited about something and am acting like I've just done a few lines of coke. I have always worked too much, put in too many hours, always feeling like if I just do that little bit more something good will happen. And the problem is that it felt like the good things did happen. Always doing that bit extra meant I got noticed, got promoted, got rewarded. So I kept doing it. I continued this approach for fifteen years and then in March 2020 the pandemic hit. At the time I was the CTO of Echo, an online pharmacy, and like many companies that offered a delivery service demand went through the roof. I was working seven days a week, eleven hours a day, doing everything I could to help us keep up with the growth. By July I was completely burnt-out and I took a week off work to \"recover\" but just went right back at it afterwards. In October I passed out in the bathroom, badly cutting my lip as I fell against the sink. My partner found me collapsed in the hallway. I had been drinking pretty heavily that night and that probably contributed, but it was likely the earliest sign of the cancer growing in my body. Six months later I was diagnosed.

I remember getting the call from the doctor who told me without much ceremony \"you have Hodgkins Lymphoma\" followed by the slightly comical \"but if you were to get any cancer you'd want to get this one\". I remember feeling calm and accepting of this utterly awful news. I told my partner in a very matter of fact way and then called my parents to \"update them\".

\"Wow, I'm handling this so well\" I thought.

I was told by the team treating me that it was advisable to see a counsellor or therapist, and so I started having weekly therapy sessions. It wasn't until the second or third session, after I'd had my first chemotherapy treatment, that the calm and \"in control\" Jon melted away to reveal an utterly emotionally overwhelmed Jon. The tears came, in floods and floods, and they kept coming. I suddenly realised how incredibly angry I was. How sad and defeated I felt. It wasn't just the cancer. It was the pandemic, the lockdown caused by said pandemic, the wedding that got cancelled because of said lockdown, the stress of a decade and a half of working too much, my relationship with my parents etc. etc. A whole lifetime of thoughts that had until this point just lived in my head started to get said out loud and I came to realise how noisy and chaotic my mind was. I started to take mindfulness seriously, read books on the topic, actively practiced, and slowly (very slowly) started to become more aware when my thoughts were spiralling. I leaned to be with my thoughts. I slowed down.

And so here I am, just over a year later, still being treated for this horrid disease, still learning to live at a more sustainable pace. The next phase of my treatment is a stem cell transplant, which I have been warned will be particularly unpleasant and will require an extended stay in hospital followed by a long recovery time at home, but it should lead to a complete cure. I responded well to the most recent round of chemotherapy and my last scans were all clear, so I'm going into it with good odds, but life likes to throw shit at you so who knows.

We humans are stupid creatures and so often need to learn things the \"hard way\". When I met my partner she was reading the Power of Now by Eckhart Tolle, which at the time I poked fun at for being \"spiritual mumbo jumbo\". She tried to introduce me to yoga and meditation which I did at best half-heartedly. Now I have egg on my face, cancer in my blood, and am writing blog posts about being more \"present in the moment\". Life comes at you fast.

Life is also not all bad. In fact far from it. Yes I have cancer, and that is pretty rubbish. But this year we also finally moved into our new house following a long renovation. The end result is better than we could have imagined and we've ended up with a beautiful home that we couldn't be happier with. We now live a stones throw from Epping Forest and go for long walks there daily with our rather silly but adorable dog Bowie. In January this year I co-founded a business with two incredibly talented (and lovely) people, we have hired an amazing team and are building something I'm genuinely excited about. A month or two ago we bought a piano (benefit of having more space) and I have been playing a little every day, slowly getting better. I have been cooking more and my success ratio in the kitchen is definitely improving. In between chemo treatments last year I managed to squeeze some recording in and will be putting out some new songs later this year. There is so much to be thankful for, be proud of, and to celebrate. There is also pain and suffering. As the French say, that's life.

So writing is hard. Not due to a lack of thoughts but because of too many. Too much thinking, too much noise, not enough understanding, not enough stillness. As I have started to slow down and to be more present, my thoughts spiralling less, I have also found that individual thoughts have more space to develop. Which is why I am going to give the writing thing another go. My plan is to write something every month, just whatever is on my mind. Who am I writing for? Well mostly just for myself. Which isn't totally out of character for me as I've been writing, recording, and releasing music for years now which I'm pretty sure no-one listens to except for me and probably my mum. But if you are reading this and have found it interesting then that's great. Hopefully my words turned into coherent sentences and just possibly through an act of techno-telepathy I have been able to copy some thoughts from my brain into yours.

","root","actionData","errors"]

Jon Bretman

2024

2022