Look at these stories:

John Choong is a successful businessman. He  died of lung cancer a few months after he publicly announced that he had the disease and that he was going to fight it with everything he had.

After his death, I read some of the tributes that poured in about the life of John Choong. One of the common themes that appeared in the statements made by his friends and colleagues was that they remembered what a determined, competitive man he was.

They said that he took on his battle with cancer head on, and that he fought his cancer the same way he battled everything, with iron will and determination. Unfortunately he didn’t win. Anyway he couldn't win.

Reading about John Choong’s losing battle with lung cancer reminded me of another conversation I had had about cancer very recently.

Recently an old classmate, Tom visited me. It was a social visit.

After some re-union discussion, Tom started telling me about his mother’s experience of living with cancer. A lot of what Tom had to say was very true of one important principle of palliative medicine, "be flexible".

Tom told me that his mother had been diagnosed with a bad type of bone cancer and doctors had told her that she had only a very short time to live. Yet in spite of the fact that her cancer kept spreading to other parts of her body, she managed to live ten years longer than what her doctors had originally predicted.

Tom said that he often wondered why his mother managed to live such a long time with cancer when many of his younger friends who got cancer died of it quite quickly.

Tom told me “I come from a sports and and athletic background, and so a lot of my friends are athletes. My athletic friends tend to be very focused and competitive people, and they’re used to being very aggressive. When they were diagnosed with cancer, I watched them go into their competitive and athletic mode, and they would say ‘I’m going to fight this thing’.

They would fight their cancer the same way they fought their athletic battles, with gritted teeth and courage and determination.

Tom said, “What I noticed about these guys who were so tough and fought cancer so hard was that in a lot of cases they burned out really soon.

When my mother got cancer, Tom continued, “Her approach was kind of the opposite. She wanted to live, but she never said she was going to fight this cancer. One of the things I watched her do is that she decided to drop everything that was stressful from her life.”

Shopping was stressful for her, so she dropped it. Driving a car was stressful so she stopped driving. In fact, she stopped doing everything she didn’t want to do, and she only kept the things she really enjoyed.

And she made a point of becoming very relaxed and enjoying her life.

Then Tom told me, “This experience made me think that maybe the idea of fighting for your life when you have cancer is like trying to fight off insomnia.”

“If you decide to fight insomnia by gritting your teeth and saying ‘I’m tough, I’ve fought lots of battles, I’m going to fight this insomnia and I’ m going to beat this thing, well, you’ll never fall asleep. It won’t work.”

Now I can’t say that what seemed to work for Tom’s mother in living with cancer is the miracle key for anyone else who has cancer. This wasn’t a scientific study, and many other factors are involved.

But Tom’s comments about his mother’s approach to living with cancer, and his comments about trying to use will power to fight insomnia are worth keeping in mind when we are facing a problem. Not every problem can be solved with will power and determination.

In such fields as business and sports, an attitude of determination and competitiveness can be very useful, and can be highly rewarded. If we have been very successful in these fields by being high powered, determined and aggressive, we may try to use the same approach to tackle every problem. Aggressively and head-on. With grit and determination.

However, being aggressive and determined does not work on every kind of problem.

If your spouse is unhappy in your marriage, or your child has a serious illness, or if you have too much stress in your life, then using determination and aggression will not solve these problems. In these situations, aggressiveness does not work.

We need to recognize those situations where another approach might work better. In other words we have to be flexible in certain situations.

Sometimes what we need to do is relax more, let go of our illusion that we can control everything, become more humble, and be open to living in the moment even when we don’t know all the answers.