Scouring The Sickness For The Lost Scintilla Of…Umm…Energy

Getting sick is humbling. Deep beneath the congestion, the wheezing, the fever, the aches, and the all-encompassing weariness, I know there is a part of me that thinks, “This will be good for you in the long run. It helps build character. Come on, be gallant.”

While in the throes of the “blahs,” this part is obviously calling up from some quiet and chthonic place within me, some place near the stalactite of hope. The surface level self doesn’t hear the whispers of the humbled one underground. How could it hear such a small voice? There is too much commotion on the surface (like wheezing, and vehement coughing, and the dull thoughts that go around and around and around on the Ferris Wheel of Nausea). By golly, sometimes it feels like I am turning into a lukewarm puddle of unproductive shit when I get sick. How could the little voice get a megaphone and tell me otherwise?

Getting sick is humbling and it’s also a biological necessity. Colds and fevers probably attack us from time-to-time so we can immunize ourselves against larger viral marauders in the area. They help the immune system out by entraining it to dispose of viral intruders when the time arises. You could say they are friends who pack a necessary punch.

Skeptic: What? How could a sickness possibly be considered a friend? It plunders us. It decimates us. Saying a sickness is a friend is like saying the Holocaust is history’s friend. The notion just seems heretical.

The notion seems heretical, but it’s also a post-conventional way of looking at a conventional sickness. A sickness is a cellular friend who comes along to teach us a tough lesson in Equilibrium 101: the body in order to function soundly throughout a lifetime needs to know the meaning of sickness. The balance between sickness and health needs to be acknowledged. After all, two snakes climb up the staff of medicine, the royal caduceus. How could their natures be exactly the same? They aren’t. One may represent total health and the other may represent total sickness. Their mutual climb symbolizes their need for a greater wholeness. This “greater wholeness” microcosmically is the longevity of the being and macrocosmically is the longevity of the species.

So even though I am still feeling the “blahs,” and even though I still feel cerebrally neutered, I think I am glad I view the sickness as a friend and not an enemy. Enemies take a really long time to get rid of.