Sarah explained what she found this saying to mean to her:
"Everything we hope for, every dream or goal, that vision in our heads of how we think and therefore expect our life will be (give or take a few setbacks) is an illusion. Suffering occurs when our dreams for the future are crushed, but these dreams were never real and never guaranteed anyway so mourning their loss and suffering over it is really really...silly."
"When you get cancer with a bad prognosis, or any disease or life altering tragedy strikes, the real suffering is in mourning the loss of what you believed your life would be. For me, that was the job and course I was taking, the house I wanted to buy, the kids I wanted to have, the travel ling, the gray hair, the grand kids. Typical stuff. But I could see it all so clearly, and even though I knew there would be bumps in the road and life would challenge me and offer up unexpected paths, I just knew that everything would be ok. I've had some terrible things happen in my life and I knew that bad things did happen to good people. But because I so clearly understood that my job was to mother and I could visualize my life through the decades as if they already existed, I was pretty much convinced that I would live a long life, more or less how I thought it would be."
"All I will say is that something spoke to me that day. I don't know who and I don't care who, but it was nice of them. I don't believe I was suppose to "learn a lesson", I believe I was being comforted and reminded that life is now so I better not waste it wallowing in the "if onlys" and "why me's". Sure, I'm human and I do go there now and again, I especially did in the beginning of this disease, but when I go there, I have that phrase to remember, to shake me out of the self-pity. Hopes and dreams are just an illusion. I don't want to DO, I want to BE. That is living in the present. Being ok with being instead of doing doing doing. All we have is the present."
