Dazed, you analyze your environment instead of glossing it over, and the daily world around you becomes like a word you look at so deeply, you finally see its combination, its uniqueness, its specialty and weirdness. On non-sick days, we have work to do and all the objects around us are scenery to that work. But on sick-days, the idea becomes inverted, and clearly we, the doers, are the scenery to all of it. We entertain the birds and the trees.
As a sick child, I marveled at the world that existed during the school day outside of school. There's the mailman who brings us the mail; that's when the neighbors leave for work; these are the birds who eat the birdseed. How wonderful this cereal tastes for lunch instead of the plastic-cheesed nachos!
Still in education (I got so accustomed as a child to the values and routines of School I couldn't leave) I think about students and teachers at my school in real time. "Oh, it's 9:50, 3rd period must just be getting started. They must be walking in the door right now, feeling out the temperment of the sub." I smile and rejoin the characters of the book I'm reading in bed, while listening to the crows cackle and the vents hiss.
I think of the philosopher Berkeley and his belief that the only reality we have is what we sense, and today I'm separated from my habitual reality. I'm sitting here now, 1:45 in the afternoon, looking at leafless tree branches explode silently from its trunk like frozen fireworks, and downtown's buildings, I can see, are about to be shrouded in rain clouds coming in over the bay.
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It has just turned 2:05, the time my school lets out, and here at my desk in my home, there are no stacking of chairs or kids noisily loading onto buses or cavorting in the courtyard. A car with an unknown driver turns the corner toward 23rd, and that's my 2:05 today; the tree is still frozen in explosion, and that my 2:05. As a child, you don't get it, but as an adult, it's a quiet reminder not every 2:05 has to be the same, that you could spend a 2:05 in the Sahara or making love or begging for change, that only a small group of people actually experience 2:05 like you do (your way of life isn't obligatory), and if you really wanted, you could experience 2:05 in another way, or if you like your 2:05s, well then, appreciate them a little more.
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On sick days, your mind does not ponder the large ideas (death, purpose, love, justice), it ponders the things around you, like bird-feeders and toothpaste and the day's changing light. Because this is not routine, you are unable to routinely hop into your internal discourses and circular worries while sitting on the bus or eating lunch silently with colleagues. Like a traveler in a new land, you just observe.
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I'm reminded of traveling with Erica in Nevada. We sat in a car with her nephews and their dad, driving through a small town an hour north of Las Vegas. We were a few blocks from their home, and their dad suddenly turned a corner and another and suddenly we didn't know where we were in the small town. Suddenly, though, we were right back at their home. Erica said, "I didn't know you could get to your home this way." One of the little boys, a 4-year old, turned around in his seat smiling and told us, "Dad likes to mix it up every once in a while." I could see their dad smile, too, in the reflection of the rear view mirror.
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Being sick is a way of mixing it up, at least for those who are healthy the majority of the time. (Though I know many live this way, I cannot imagine being healthy as the way to mix up a primarily ill life.) Regarding this, Susan Sontag wrote
Illness is the night-side of life, a more onerous citizenship. Everyone who is born holds dual citizenship in the kingdom of the well and in the kingdom of the sick. Although we all prefer to use only the good passport, sooner or later each of us is obliged, at least for a spell, to identify ourselves as citizens of that other place.
My passport from "the other place" expires in a day or two ("after pushing the liquids and getting lots of rest," the message passed onto my parents on sick days just like this one) and soon I'll return to the land of the healthy, where I'll play tennis and drink a glass of wine and get in my car to get on the freeway and go to work and will soon forget about my firework-like tree. Right now, though, I am sick. Not deathly sick, thankfully, but sick enough to mix up my routines, to once again see objects freshly and with wonder.
When you stop thinking, for a short while, about ideas and you ponder just about things in front of you, reality becomes tighter. Human experience becomes delightfully more limited. You can't think about the "void" of death; you can't think about "Is this what I'm supposed to be doing?" When I sense my world like I do today--a feeling I can get on a bicycle or when traveling in a countryside or lying down in a park--I lose any anxiety I have because I sense, palpably, what I sensed as a child: that this life, that this is perfection, this is my reality, perceived with these eyes and nerves, and there's nothing more and nothing less than that, and that's how it will be for me for as long as I live.
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Since quickly he's becoming my hero, I'll end with a quote by Montaigne:
It is an absolute perfection and virtually divine to know how to enjoy our being rightfully. We seek other conditions because we do not understand the use of our own, and go outside of ourselves because we do not know what is like inside. Yet there is no use our mounting on stilts, for on stilts we must still walk on our own legs. And on the loftiest throne in the world we are still sitting only our own rump.
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Enjoy the texture of your sheets. Enjoy the machinery of your self, propping up your soul. Good night.
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