Y’all I’ve been siiiick these past few days, so today’s newsletter is a day late and short and sweet.
I don’t get sick very often but when I do, I go down hard.
I get symptoms that are hard to put a finger on: a fuzzy-head, achy kidneys, sore eye sockets, a “prickly” back. (Please comment below if you are also a person that gets a weird prickly back when you’re ill??)
I seem to get sick in four stages:
Feel a little weird. Hope that I don’t keep feeling weird.
Feel bad. Pretend I don’t feel bad. Tell myself if I keep pretending then the bad feeling will probably go away.
Get actively sick. Break down and finally take some medicine now that the truth cannot be avoided.
Lie in the bed, wondering. How long this will last? What’s wrong with my body? What could these symptoms possibly mean? How did I get this? When will I get better? What should I do to make it stop? Like I’m freaking Dr. House about to wield my Bachelor of Music and my elementary teaching certificate to diagnose myself.
Anyway, yesterday as I was lying in bed wandering down Rumination Road, my thoughts found their way to asking “WWBD?”
As in, “What would Buddha do?”1
Friends, I do not claim expertise in Buddhism. (My education and experience of the teachings of Buddha consists of listening to a couple hundred Tara Brach podcast episodes and sitting a few meditation retreats.) But I do from time-to-time find myself envisioning how a being much more enlightened than myself would handle my very human life circumstances.
And the answer I came up with yesterday was: Buddha would just… be sick. He wouldn’t make it a problem or be all, “Oh no! This is soo terrible! I can’t be sick!”
He probably wouldn’t lay down to try to take a nap and get caught up in thoughts about his mushrooming to-do list, mentally struggling to rank and prioritize tasks, muzzy-headed-ly attempting to mastermind solutions to all of his small and medium-sized personal problems while exasperatedly wondering when he was going to be done with all this and finally feel well enough to finally jam on all these things he needed to get done.
I don’t think he would look at “sickness” as a problem that needed to be overcome or somehow wrestled into submission.
And I started to wonder, what would happen if I accepted being sick as just part of the human experience? One of those yin-yang, everything in balance, kind of things?
I’m not saying that I have to believe that being sick is “good.”
But if I dropped my resistance to being sick and my relentless focus on the negative, might I discover some insight or beauty hiding in the cracks of my sickbed?
Lo and behold, there were a few things I was missing.
Being sick forces me to rest. Resisting rest makes it hard to experience this benefit, so being sick is a perfect chance to renew and reestablish my relationship to rest.
Many of the symptoms I’m having are cause for awe and celebration—my unfathomably complex immune system is doing its thing! Hurrah for functioning T cells, keep kicking some ass!
Being sick punctured the perfectionist fantasies I had about making my husband’s Fathers Day and birthday “perfect.” I spent the majority of both days in bed, mostly leaving my husband to care for the kids and fend for himself. Looking back on the perfectly lovely days they turned out to be, I’m reminded that I can drop all my self-imposed pressure to make holidays and celebrations some Pinterest-perfect nonsense. Simple expressions of love and appreciation can be powerful and deeply felt.
Being sick invites me to practice listening to my body in ways I don’t when I’m “well,” to tune into what it’s telling me, how it feels across both external and internal landscapes. If I sense the symptoms are at bay for the moment, I can set a timer for 3 minutes and pick up 7 things from the living room and put them away. If my innards are, instead, a Fun House of twisted torture, I lay down. I close my eyes. Maybe I get some water. (Real water, not some sparkling seltzer wannabe. Sipping this magical elixir of hydrogen and oxygen when I’m ill feels like the epitome of luxuriant self-care.)
Do I have a preference for not being sick? Sure, I do. But how tightly do I want to hold onto that preference when my current reality is shivering under the covers with a kleenex up my nose?
So much about life that is beautiful remains beautiful regardless of the transient health of this physical body.
And I guess it was worth a trip down Rumination Road and feeling the fire of a hundred nails pricking my back to remember that.
If the Buddha doesn’t do it for you, you can pick another reframing question:
-How might my highest self handle this?
-What is another way I could think (or feel) about this?
-Or maybe…? (Push yourself to find other explanations/perspectives.)
Thank you! Just forwarded to my friend who has been mad-sick for a week with the hopes it will help her see she can choose another perspective