My favourite line of understatement comes not from a Briton or a Spartan, but from the Japanese Emperor Hirohito. In August 1945, after Japan’s defeats in all recent battles and the destruction of two cities with nuclear bombs, he announced that “the war situation has not necessarily evolved to Japan’s advantage.”
Well, I regret to announce that my cancer situation has also evolved, not necessarily to my benefit.
Last year I was diagnosed with throat cancer and thought my treatment would be like a trip to the South Pole. Sadly, although chemotherapy and radiotherapy did a good job on the tumors in my throat and neck, my lungs are now riddled with the damn things.
The forecast is not exactly ‘Don’t buy green bananas’, but rather ‘Don’t start reading any long books’.
It looks like I’m going to jump off the branch, and probably sooner rather than later. But there are many things that comfort me right now.
The enormous support and compassion my wife, Aurelie, and I have received from friends, neighbors, and even complete strangers. My job, which I am lucky enough to love (I still work every day, but often go out at 3pm to have a beer with someone… The rules are different in Cancerland!).
And there are three related thoughts that I have over and over again that bring me joy and that I write down to share.
First of all, I take comfort in thinking that I have had a really good, almost charming life (I’ll start this article by bragging in the hope that you will have forgiven or forgotten by the end).
I have dined with lords and billionaires and broken bread with the poorest people on Earth. I have performed prodigious feats of drink. I have personally allocated and delivered at least £100m worth of foreign aid over the years. I have been a Samaritan and a policeman, and I got away with a charge of attempted murder in Vietnam (trumped up to get a bribe) by singing karaoke in a brothel.
I have climbed the Great Pyramid, sailed the Mediterranean and chipped away chunks of concrete at Checkpoint Charlie in Berlin. I have travelled across five continents, sung in choirs on three and crossed borders with diplomatic immunity. I have seen tigers and bears roaming free. I have witnessed airstrikes, rockets and shootings, the despair of the bereaved and the blank stares of those who have been ethnically cleansed.
I have overturned a car, been shot in the leg and knocked out a tooth. The Times has published my letters and now I am publishing out of vanity a very rude poem about cyclists.
But above all, I have loved and been loved. I am wrapped up in that stuff; my cup overflows. At 46, I have lived far longer than most humans in the 300,000-year history of our species. You probably have, too. And if the book of my life is shorter than that of many modern people, it is still an interesting read. Length and quality are no more correlated in lives than in novels or movies.
So, carpe diem and don’t stop carping. Enjoy the small ways you can make other people a little happier. Second comforting thought: No one knows if there’s a God or an afterlife, but it seems unlikely that our existence is a brief, random flash of consciousness between eternities of nothingness.
A benevolent creator seems to me no more far-fetched than the latest attempts in physics to make sense of our world: for example, that there are an infinity of universes existing in parallel. Our quasi-instinct may well be almost right; what will survive in us will be love.
And finally, the thought that always comes to mind is how lucky it is to have lived. Existing is like winning the lottery. In fact, there are many extraordinarily improbable moments of luck that have occurred just so that we were born: the laws of physics, the intensity of forces and the mass of an electron are precisely balanced so that stars and planets can form.
Somehow, inanimate stardust combined to become self-replicating, and somehow developed further into complex life.
Of all the billions of people in the world, your parents met and fused. And of all the sperm and eggs they produced, the only two that would become you fused and multiplied.
If the moment of your conception had been different – a week later, a bottle of wine to clear your head – you would not have been born.
Adding to the astonishing improbability of your being here to read this is the good fortune of living where and when we do. To refresh Victorian Cecil Rhodes, to have been born in Western Europe is, in itself, to have won the lottery of life.
We also live in a time of extraordinary abundance, in which the poorest among us are richer than any medieval king in terms of access to food, energy, care, knowledge and justice.
So if I complain that my life will have been shorter than that of many modern people, I am totally wrong. I have been around for 46 years. It is as rude as winning the EuroMillions jackpot and then complaining bitterly when you find out there is another winning ticket and you will only get half of it.
Life is precious, improbable and beautiful. You are exquisite.
We should be dazzled by our good fortune: dancing on tables every day. And I intend to keep dancing for as long as I remain here. And (who knows?) maybe after that too.
The original version of this article appeared in the Jersey Evening Post.
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