Pear

Life is a busy box of chocolates. Some are sweet, and many are nutty. 

You wake on a Monday morning and stare at the never-ending to-do list. The stifling weather and unanswered emails conspire like a tough examiner. You may be consumed by feelings of the damn busy schedule. Before you can make another complaint or curse, you find out you have a brain tumour. That means a long surgery, after which you can no longer breathe on your own without a tube running down your throat. You can't even swallow. The next thing to keep you alive is a tube to fill your stomach with food goo and water. 

That's the one of the worst Kafkaesque situations we can imagine, as was the case for the American writer Jeannie Gaffigan in 2017. She wrote about her pear-sized brain tumour in the memoir When Life Gives You Pears. That tumour took a massive mental and physical toll on her. Much of the days were spent in the ICU, a no-kid-zone, where you can find the worst germs and bacteria in the hospital. To get herself out of the germ-infested hospital as soon as possible, Jeannie immediately nodded when her doctor suggested a tracheostomy. A scar on her neck or throat was nothing compared to the tube-up-the-nose-attached-to-a-machine-in-the-hospital option. That sounded horrible but was a piece of cake for Jeannie after all the challenging back-and-forth uber-gurney journeys inside hospital.

On reflection, Jeannie found out that she had been wrong to sweat the small stuff before the life-changing crisis. Many of us, like Jeannie, are taking so much time to make sure our garden looked perfect that we  ultimately miss our chance to smell the flowers.