Awaking today exactly a week to go before my brain surgery at Addenbrooke’s Hospital in Cambridge, I found myself reflecting on my calmness when my tumours were revealed in my cranial MRI Scan just a few week’s ago.
While awaiting the scan results, I sat and re-read the last chapter of “Don’t Sleep, There are Snakes: Life and Language in the Amazonian Jungle” by Daniel Everett, in which he describes his journey into the Amazon as an evangelistic missionary to translate the Bible into the language of the Pirahã tribe, and ultimately lost his religion.
He found “the happiest tribe on Earth” who had no interest in things outside their immediate experience, so had no need of Dan’s Evangelism. According to Pirahã, if you or at least people close to you haven’t experienced something, it is simply not relevant. The Pirahã show that happiness lies in small, daily activities, that the more we try to complicate the worse our lives become.
This idea was still in my mind, when minutes later I was gazing at an image of a “walnut sized” tumour on the Doctor’s monitor. The clarity and immediacy of my new situation induced a surprising peace, and even a profound happiness which has stayed with me. This feeling may go, but for now it is my new friend, enriching the present, the only moment in which I actually am living.