I think a lot about the moment that cancer cells first start growing. What happens in that moment, where one minute there is nothing and the next there is something? How does it happen that in the span of a moment my fourteen year old is healthy and life is normal and then suddenly it isn’t.

I wonder when it happened. We first noticed the lump in her cheek in August, a couple weeks before she started high school. It wasn’t until November that we got the actual diagnosis. During that time it seemed to be growing slowly – so slowly that we could almost convince ourselves that it wasn’t. And then all of a sudden it grew faster. Like the biopsy needle had made it mad. Like it knew it had been found out and was scrambling to get a foothold.

The type of cancer she has is aggressive. (Even the type of the type of cancer she has is aggressive. Go figure.) So how long had it been in there before we could even see it? A month? Was it there when we flew to Switzerland together in July? Is it hiding in the picture of her glowing at the Taylor Swift concert? Two months? Did it arrive on her birthday in June? Had it been lying dormant in there for years? Was this moment determined even before she was born?

“How” and “when” seem like obvious questions. So does “why”. But we have to be careful with that one. Wondering why something like this would happen can’t really actually get you anywhere except down a dark well of thoughts that don’t help anything. So I guess we just learn how to be okay with not knowing anything.

We are in Minnesota this week, starting the second week of the second round of radiation. Our AirBNB house sits at the end of a picturesque tree-lined street connected to a small insular network of tree-lined streets. The vast majority of the trees lining the neighborhood are big, old ash trees, currently in the height of fall glory. Ash trees are one of the earliest to change, turning bright gold alongside the cottonwoods. The neighborhood trees still have most of their gold even as the maples and oaks begin to think about catching up, but the fall wind has also started to knock some loose. Which means our street not only has a golden, sunlit canopy it also has delightful little piles of leaves that crunch under your feet as you walk.

More than two decades ago in 2002 someone near Detroit, Michigan found a small, iridescent green bug that almost resembles a grasshopper in a dying stand of ash trees and submitted it to the entomology department at the University of Michigan. It was later identified as the Emerald Ash Borer (EAB), an insect native to Asia that feeds on and infests ash trees. In a span of 3-5 years, EAB will kill roughly 99% of the trees it touches, cutting off their ability to pull nutrients from the soil so that they starve to death. It spreads quickly and attacks every species of ash tree on the continent. Since its discovery, it has resulted in the death of hundreds of millions of trees and threatens more than a billion trees in the US alone.

All because sometime in 1990s one or a few bugs made it over in a shipping pallet. One moment they weren’t here. And then suddenly, they were.

You could make yourself crazy if you wanted to, thinking about how much could happen in a moment. Wondering what is happening in this moment as we speak. Wondering if there was already a moment we missed, a moment that will change our trajectory, change our lives, change everything. And we don’t even know it yet.

I suppose you could also make yourself crazy wondering about the parade of moments speeding toward us, not knowing what they will bring.

There are a lot of ways you could make yourself crazy.

A host of religious and spiritual practices tout the power of staying in the present moment. And I get it. There so much here in this moment that we miss all the time because we are too busy looking behind or in front of where we are now.

And yet – sometimes we have to look ahead a little bit. Some moments we can’t see coming, but some we can. Someone, at some moment in time, looked at this tree lined cul-de-sac and realized that, if invaded by the approaching Emerald Ash Borer, it would be bare of any tree cover within a few years time. Bare of the shimmering gold canopy and the crunching brown carpet, bare of the shade and the rustling whisper of leaves. And decided to intervene.

Now each tree bears two small silver tags, giving every tree a unique monitoring number and identifying when they were last treated with an insecticide. It’s not a guarantee–infected trees are still removed when necessary. But it helps. The glowing tunnel leading to our house stands as proof.

Will the radiation and maintenance chemo be enough to ward off another moment where cancer cells begin growing where they shouldn’t? Can we change the trajectory? Perhaps more importantly: what does it look like to go back to living our lives not knowing what the next moment brings, not knowing if everything has already changed and we just don’t know it yet? Am I strong enough to stand in this moment anyway?

What other choice do we have?