Being Sick

Being Sick

   Woody Guthrie once said, "Life's pretty tough...you're lucky if you live through it."  This came to mind when several weeks ago, my wife caught some sort of bug, a stomach flu that come to find out, had infected virtually every employee at our local grocery store.  Where it came from was anyone's guess...a grocery cart handle, grabbing change, a sneeze, a package of meat.  But it was there, debilitating and immbobilizng to my wife's usually strong immune system.  Feeling both sorry for her and yet a bit smug that I was still free of the bug, I continued my normal routine, even overdoing it a bit by splitting wood, mowing the lawn, cleaning the deck, and before long, I found myself caught in its snare, not entirely mind you, but enough to make me realize that I could no longer override a few things. 

   Often these bugs or viruses or diseases, arrive through no fault of our own.  Our healthy diet or lifestyle is simply caught offguard by the stealth attack, a SWAT team of sorts just waiting outside our bodies for an opening.  And once in, the battle commences.  Our bodies mount a full defense without question as if responding to a break-in, and there is an expected end result of much loss of cellular life, our brains putting much of our lives on hold as it mounts its counter-attack.  Sometimes, the fight becomes lopsided against us...the tumor grows or the infection gets worse, and we call in outside help, a visit to the clinic or to get medicine to help our anti-body soldiers.  And down we go, our energy sapped, our routines forcibly put on hold.  Despite what our brain might say, our body simply says, "I've got other things to do that are more important," and that is that.

   When we are healthy, we sometimes fantasize about getting sick and having the time to "stop the world;"  finally, we think, we can just lie in bed and read or watch movies, or catch up on cleaning a room.  But the reality is that once we are sick, we rarely feel like doing much of anything.  Even a magazine seems to take hours to get through, our attention and retention seemingly also having moved to a slower gear.  Often even sleep is evasive, always there on the outskirts but never fully coming in far enough to make an appearance.

   We seem to expect to recover, to bounce back after a bit.  But sometimes the down time is longer than expected, reaching a point where we finally just succumb and give in to our exhausted bodies.  It is at that point that we somewhat grudgingly accept that this is something that is out of our control, and our mind begins to finally separate from our physical body.  We finally DO slow down and take things in;  and for me, that meant the cats came around, settling in by my resting body, bringing comfort to both of us for they are quite happy and surprised to have me be still for more than a minute or two.  And it was then that I also noticed the trees swaying with the wind outside the window, the birds suddenly quiet as a storm appeared to be coming outside.  And it was also then that it hit me that despite how I felt, the world simply moved on.  Despite wars and earthquakes and personal tragedies throughout history, the world was just moving on.  As one writer put it when his own daughter was gravely ill in the hospital, he felt like he was in an aquarium, the outside world seemingly totally unaware of all that was happening here in this room; couldn't those other people just casually passing by seeing how critical things were and how fragile his daughter's life was becoming?

   We are all part of this.  And perhaps when sick, or perhaps especially when sick, we should take a moment to feel grateful for our place in this world.  We are indeed a small speck in this universe, but a small speck we are, a small speck that wh hope is necessary to form part of the whole.  As I wrote my mother this past Mother's Day, without her (and my father, of course) I wouldn't be here at all...truly, I owed her my life, my existence.  And in being sick and having to slow down, I felt that perhaps it's time to again think of our world, a world continually moving on no matter how we're feeling, as our Mother Earth.  For without her, without our "mother," we wouldn't be here at all.  We should be grateful, even when we're feeling low, for pointing out and reminding us how precious life is.  Truly, we owe her our lives.