When I was recovering from cancer treatment, I went through a couple of years obsessively working to regain physiological things I had lost. And when I say obsessed, I mean obsessed. After a certain point, I realized I wasn’t living – instead I was caught in a trap I had made myself, spending what little time I had left trying to get something back that was gone forever. Somewhere in this period I saw the Coen brothers great film adaptation of Cormac McCarthy’s novel “No Country For Old Men,” and one of the characters was reflecting on loss. He spoke the following line that was immediately burned into my brain, because I recognized the folly of what I was trying to do:
“All the time you spend trying to get back what’s been took from you, more’s going out the door.”
I immediately changed my life.