During my odyssey with cancer, I learned a great many things. One of the most crucial was the almost simultaneous need to inhabit myself while staying connected to others. With each test, office visit, surgery, and treatment, I had to prepare, as best I could, for things no one could anticipate. In order to do this, I had to center myself and connect with the underlying flow of Universe that fills me with a strength and perspective beyond my tiny self. To do this, I needed to be alone. I needed to enter my solitude, which once entered becomes a threshold to everything that is elemental, eternal, and divine. All my loved ones grew to expect my gathering inward, especially before each medical procedure. But once centered, once in the Universal flow, I had to connect with my loved ones in order to endure the experience.

Now that I’m well, the ways in which we survived—alone and together—have stayed with me, and the more I have thought about them, the more they represent a basic and unavoidable paradox about living, which is this: Though each of us must go through our suffering alone, no one can make it alone. Though no one can save us from our own feelings, not one of us can carry those feelings in the world without the support of others.

I remember wheeling Ann to her surgery, her stretcher wobbling down the sanitized hall, her groggy eyes looking back at me, our hands entwined. I wheeled her as far as they would let me, and then, quite suddenly, though I knew it was coming, the glass doors of the operating room stopped me and she was wheeled on. I stood there, pressed against the glass, watching her grow smaller and smaller.

I realized then that whether it be our search for purpose, our struggle with confusion, our working through grief, or the violent evolution of our identity, no one can go beyond the glass door with you. Each of us must do that work alone. Each of us must ask our questions and feel our pain and be surprised by wonder in the very personal terrain that exists beyond that glass door. The best we can do in loving others is wheel each other as far as possible and be there when our loved ones return. But the work that changes our very lives, the work that yields inner transformation, the work that allows us to be reborn within the same skin must always be done alone. This is the work of solitude, and the attending to and from the glass door is the work of compassion, and the sharing of what we each discover in our solitude is the work of education, and the wisdom by which we weave that inner knowledge and that compassion—this is the work of community.