State of Mind #3: Sick again

I've got a cold today. It's Sunday though. It started yesterday and I noticed it early. If I get a cold during the work week I deny it because I feel I can't stop. But I've acknowledged this one and think I can beat it by tomorrow or the next day if I'm careful and honest with myself.

I'm noticing an entire storehouse of emotions opening up with this sickness. Vulnerability, grief, fear of abandonment, fear of imperfection, fear of what I'll never see, say, do, be or have. Last night a friend showed me a book of homeopathic remedies. I said, "Hey, I'd like to have that book." Today I'm stricken with this understanding that I might never get around to getting that book. I might never have it, might never use it. I might just continue being me as I am now instead. And somehow that seems so tragic.

Things are magnified when you're ill, but only magnified.

Yesterday's parsha contained the 10 "utterances". One of the first good drashes I ever gave publicly was from this parsha, and I talked about the sequence of the commandments -- beyond just that the first half are about our relationship with God, and that the second half are about people. I tried to find other symmetry, other relationships between them. The last "utterance" (or commandment) is not to covet. And I linked that back to number one, that "I am the Lord your God." If we really do have faith in God, we can more easily accept that what we have and what things will come to us are God's will. So i still have to work for everything in my life, but if I don't get that book, I just don't need it very much. (This is not about an impoverished person "not needing" money and food. This is about me wanting a book and being realistic that I might not get around to getting it.)

But back to feelings. Time has a different shape today. It feels slow and gentle. I want the day to go on forever. I want to take the time I need to do what I need to and to rest in between. And the truth is, I want the time to wallow in today's darkness. I have a strange relationship with inertia... I often don't like change, even for the better. When I had cancer, I didn't know what I would do when I could no longer rely on tri-weekly chemo treatments to incapacitate me. I didn't know how I could do without them. It was the strangest thing. I remember when I started radiation... I would have to go in every morning. In the afternoon I was starting to volunteer at the school where I had been working before my diagnosis. The idea was that when the radiation ended, I would ease my way back into work. Now here's the funny bit. Teaching is my love, my life, the thing that makes me feel I'm contributing to the world. But I was so afraid of that change back into the classroom, that I grieved over the idea of not getting to come in every day to the hospital and get to work on the puzzle in the waiting room while sitting in a hospital gown and waiting for my hair to grow back. One day as I was working on the puzzle and eavesdropping on some older men talking about older men topics, I suddenly just didn't want to be there another second. Only then, when I couldn't stand the thought of being there another second, did I realize how much I had been wallowing in this other "time zone" where things are slow and I only have to care for myself and my illness.

I'm visiting that place again today... where I feel sick and sad and alone, and I'm actually enjoying it. I know it won't continue. (Oh, how long has it taken me to learn that! That the only thing a person can really count on is change!) So I'm grateful that it won't go on, and also grateful that I'll be back. No matter where I visit in the world or what happens in my life, there is this state of being waiting to be experienced, and needing to be experienced. And I will go there, and I will leave there again to visit another way of being.