Getting Sick

I'm in the final days of recovery from a sinus infection, after two or three days of throbbing headaches radiating through my sinus's I was hit by a fever and head full of orangish-yellow snot.  An antibiotic course, lots of ibuprofen, saline, and rest saw me overcome the worst of it and I'm slowly regaining energy and strength.  I was down for four days, not a tremendous amount of time, but I still feel physically and emotionally sapped and drained, the amount of work a body has to go through to expel an infection is tremendous and takes a heavy toll.

It is not often that I get sick.  Once a year, maybe, I'll have the 24 hour flu or a lingering cold but these are passing ailments, uncomfortable, but a footnote in the course of my month.  Being bound to a bed for four days is, to me, a significant chunk of time and offered an extended chance or reflection and retrospect. 

I was struck at how close  a metaphor getting sick is to getting laid-off -- running through life in a constant upward direction, putting a little aside, and slowly getting ahead.  But when you get laid-off all of that comes to a screeching halt what little is held aside is sacrificed and the long road up is a short fall down.  Likewise, getting sick seems to interrupt a strong flow of fitness (riding, working out, etc...) and, in the case of being down for a handful of days, if it doesn't set you back it certainly takes a great deal of will and strength to bring your body back to where it was.  It is a few days of pain and hard work after undergoing a few days of pain and hard work.

Life for, for my family, seems to be season after season of driving forward as best we can to be stopped cold by things out of our control, namely getting laid-off as the season slows to a halt.  It is easy to lapse into a fatalistic view of life and become trapped in a static a horizontal status quo.  A way of living that does not sit well with me at all.

Being sick makes me frustrated and depressed, it feels as though my body has let me down and the strength and energy I depend on to draw strength from is sapped and I am empty, crest fallen, and broken for a time.  Loosing my job is like getting sick and it takes time to recover the shattered confidence, the broken expectations, the crumbling security...  But slowly I begin to recover, put the pieces back together, and step outward, forward, onward.