well, it’s happening – we’re going to the weekend to end breast cancer walk tomorrow!
i’ve never done the walk myself, only visited and gone to the closing ceremonies. the feeling alone of being to those events gives me shivers down the spine just thinking about it.
the walk is about a collective of people making something possible, in a way that – it just occurs to me that it is a bit like a war. only a war is something where a few people decide on a goal, which, for good reasons or bad, is always destructive. then they send lots of people into the destruction, people – soldiers – who have nothing to do with making the decision to wage war in the first place, and people who simply have to follow orders.
how different this walk is!
here, the goal is something constructive. it is the opposite of war; it is a goal that celebrates the life of each and every single participant, and of each and every single person in whose honour we walk. not only that, it celebrates every short time span that some of the people living with breast cancer can wrest from the disease. “she made it through the week.” “it’s been a year, and no remission! we’re so happy!”
and the walk participants? each and every single one makes their own informed decision to participate and they do whatever they need to do to participate. then they come, out of their own free will, they show up any which way they choose, and they walk as much as they can.
we are anything but soldiers.
we may be warriors, but we’re all generals, or samurais, or – well, choose your own metaphor. we choose our own path, we have our own goals, and yet we all work on the same goal.
the feeling, when you’re at the walk, is that it’s so much more than about fundraising or even breast cancer. it’s a loud, 48-hour-long, joyous, heart-and-foot-felt, thousand-people manifesto about affirming life, supporting each other, about walking right into the face of adversity and saying, no, you can’t get me down!
our team – my friend haedy, in whose honour we walk, our friends timmie, beth, brenda and rosie, as well as my daughter mindemoya, we couldn’t have done it without literally hundreds of people who gave to us so that we could participate.
all the patrons we harangued at brenda’s boyfriend’s pubs, the people who came to the poker tournament at my husband’s company, the wonderful people at the buy-low who did the barbeque and all the people who bought hot-dogs there, and untold more people – thanks, thanks, thanks! we raised $12,000, and we’re walking into this together, walking into the face of any adversity we’ve ever met in life, and we way, no, you can’t get me down! we’re in this together, and we live!
we’ll be leaving tomorrow at 6 am (yes, you read right: 6 am!) at the plaza of nations. then we’ll try to walk 35 kilometres (about 22 miles) the first day, and 25 kilometres (about 15 miles) the next.
if you want to visit, here is a link to the cheering stations.
isabella mori
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