Robbie Stamp, the author of this guest post, originally sent this as an email, one of many messages of support, wisdom, and love I’ve received in recent months. I knew immediately it deserved to be shared as widely as I could as Robbie’s message about TI and cancer recovery is not meant for me alone. Enjoy!

Dear Terry

I am privileged to be coached by Tracey Baumann. You and I met once at Tracey’s group practice in Windsor and had a chat about Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s theories on Flow and how that influenced your work and that of the the Consultancy I chair.

I was so sorry to read recently about your prostate cancer and I just wanted to add a small extra tributary, to the ‘river of love’ for your meditations: An image of clear cool water running over smooth stones just a few feet below your swimming form and the dart and blue of a kingfisher, glimpsed as you take a breath.

I came to TI in the summer of 2012 after a hard 2-year journey following surgery for kidney cancer. My wife knew I had been struggling and also knew that I had always loved open water swimming. Indeed one of her favourite memories of our first holiday together is me saying “I’m going for a swim” and her thinking, “fair enough” and returning to her book. She was a little surprised when I didn’t return for two hours!

So she intuitively knew that, as I was having a hard time mentally and physically and was still not really comfortable in my new body, without its left kidney, that I needed to swim. She arranged a holiday on the fabled Lycian Coast in Turkey. On the first morning I took myself down the very steep hill to the sea and swam and then I swam for hours and hours on that holiday. I began to heal.

When I got back to London I googled “open water swimming.” With the universe holding me in the palm of its hand, of all the places I could have gone, I found my way to Taplow Lake where Tracey coached. She had a special aura of warmth and friendliness. I set out for a loop of the lake. Tracey said she could see that I could swim well enough, but might enjoy a lesson or two. I thought “Why not?”  I hadn’t been ‘taught’ since I was a small boy at the “Monsoon Baths.”

Being honest, I went to my first lesson with a little hubris, expecting “a nip and a tuck here and there maybe.” Instead, from my first moments in Tracey’s Endless Pool, I could feel something very special. I embarked on that journey so many had taken before me of having my technique deconstructed and reconstructed with attention, care—even love.

I swam the English Channel in a relay this summer with friends from the Tracey’s Thursday practice group. Tracey bravely accompanied us—though knowing she would be quite sea sick.  Indeed she was the one who gave me a big hug, on finishing my final leg which got us to within 750 meters of the beach in France. I sat in her arms and let out a primal howl of exhaustion, relief and triumph after five years in cancer’s shadow.

Robbie1Robbie2

I know that my story is repeated in many forms, in the face of many challenges, around a world in which TI and swimming have come to matter so much to so many.

I love the concept of Kaizen–of the happiness of being on an endless journey—in recognition that it is indeed the journey rather than the destination. The ‘steps’ on that journey are measured in the awareness and care one gives every stroke and breath–and the feeling that ‘creating beauty’ in the water is the gift of a lifetime of practice.

I also wanted to offer some other thoughts about cancer, and I hope that you will forgive the presumption. Some poetry first.  I am sure you know these lines from William Blake’s Auguries of Innocence.

“Man was made for Joy & Woe

And when this we rightly know

Thro the World we safely go

Joy & Woe are woven fine

A Clothing for the soul divine

Under every grief & pine

Runs a joy with silken twine..”

You might be less familiar with these lines from Edward Thomas, the English poet who died in the last days of the First World War, who is my favourite poet. I have loved his work since I was at school and listened to his then seventy-year old daughter read some of his poems, amongst which was “Liberty” from which this final verse comes.

“And yet I am still half in love with pain,

With what is imperfect, with both tears and mirth,

With things that have an end, with life and earth,

And this moon that leaves me dark within the door.”

Expressed so beautifully in the Blake and the Thomas is compassion, compassion for when the night seems darkest and our more vulnerable selves need care and an arm round the shoulder with that hard ‘grown-up’ acknowledgement that life can be hard too.

Here is why I think that what TI coaches do, when working at their highest calling, is so profound. The feel of the water, the sense of immersion and belonging, the pleasure like a Japanese calligrapher in the beauty of a pen line, in the beauty of a stroke and a breath and a fleeting sense of grace or a longer meditation: They all have compassion flowing through them – compassion for family and friends and colleagues and strangers and for our own small selves in the still watches of the night, in our confusions and uncertainties too.

I am sharing these lines too because I think they also contain important ideas about allowing the space for uncertainty in our cancer journey.  Indeed you wrote of the “roller coaster between fear and doubt and hope and cheer.”

There is no doubt that positivity makes a huge difference, indeed maybe genuinely at a cellular level, but we would not be human if we did not have those moments of fear too. Amidst the health-giving food, meditation, and movement exercise and that drive to do good work, those feelings need to be acknowledged as part of being human. I found that the friends with whom I could share that uncertain space too were very precious.

I remember someone saying to me early on, before I had my operation, “It’s all in the mind.” I thought, “No its not, it’s in my kidney!”  Others would say “It’s important to be positive.” Knowing they meant only kindness, there too, I sometimes longed to say, “So if I am having a tough hour, or afternoon, or indeed week, I can’t acknowledge the fear, that I must pretend otherwise?”

People often use militant or violent language about ‘fighting’ cancer. It is refreshing not to see that in what you’ve written. (Though if someone felt that helped them, I would never wish to take it away.) The key is that it is the person who has the cancer who gets to choose their metaphors. As you write, each individual must become “the agent of their own recovery.”

Early in my journey a friend who had had a brain cancer said that they were glad that they had had the cancer. At the time I thought “Wow, not sure how that works” but I now know what they meant.

If not for cancer, I would not have come to TI, would not have met Tracey and some of the wonderful fellow swimmers at the Thursday Masters practices, would not have swum the English Channel with special friends and would not have taken control of other aspects of my life too.

So Terry for all that you have brought and are yet to bring, in the hard moments ahead as well as the moments of revelation and for all the compassion and for your gifts in the water, thank you and I wish you flow for many, many years to come. 

Robbie is Chairman of Bioss, a Consultancy business that thinks a lot about what being “in flow” means for organisations and individuals. He once started a company with the late great Douglas Adams, author of the Hitchhikers’ Guide to the Galaxy, executive produced the movie for Disney, and is also Chairman of h2g2.com the web site he and others started with Douglas way back in the 1990’s.

Robbie prefers ‘skins’ (no-neo) swimming and is hoping to swim Lake Windermere in England this July with TI friends.