What's Good About Being Sick

I'm sick. Lousy sick. I starting feeling the beginning of a sore throat Friday evening. By morning, it was the real thing, and by lunch time I was feeling all the muscles in my body shutting down. Just a bad cold, and still only in the beginning stages, but it's a doozie.

Gotta love how body issues affect your brain. I was lying on the sofa resting, a time when my brain usually would be going a mile a minute on a million different subjects. Instead, my mind was singularly focused on one thing: my throat. The exact points where it hurt. How my breathing was affecting the sensations in my throat. How and where my saliva was collecting and whether it helped or hurt when I swallowed (it did both). For that thirty minutes or so, nothing existed outside of the region of my mouth and neck.

If I had intentionally attempted such focused meditation, I would never have succeeded.

Sometimes I suspect God allows me to get sick because it requires behavior of me that I should be doing more of anyway. Focused meditation. Limiting my food intake. And just rest in general – resting my body and my mind.

The other benefit of being sick is how it re-orders my priorities. My mind has been a whirr of activity for several weeks now. I have hardly sit still in my new house for longer than 10 minutes, it seems, because there is always something to do here. Another box to dig through. More stuff to decide a place for. More items to box up for Goodwill. More to take up to the attic. But this weekend, I found that with my body monopolizing the bulk of my energy in its fight against germs, what little energy I had left had to be devoted to one priority: speaking kindly to my family.

Surely I'm not the only one who find easy easy to snap at little things when I'm sick. How the heck do I know where your shoes are? No, I haven't a clue what's for dinner tonight. Leave me alone! Rawr!

But it's not their fault I feel miserable, and making them feel more miserable doesn't help anything. So, I'm pulling up my tiny reserves of energy to speak slowly, calmly, and peacefully to everyone in my house, as best I can. And of course, in the end, it takes less energy to be kind than to snap at everyone anyway. Funny how what seems to come naturally to us in a moment is not always the best thing for us. And funny how we understand that so well in some situations of our life and completely lose that fact in others.  We are such a stupid race of beings.