Sick Days

I'm re-surfacing after 4 days of sleeping, lounging around the house, and generally being sick. It's been literally YEARS since I've been sick. It was a weird thing.

Time takes on an entirely new quality when you are sick. Hours stretch out before you with absolutely nothing to fill them. Sometimes you're lucky enough to doze off, sometimes unlucky enough to retire to the bathroom for an uncomfortably long time. But mostly, there is just a slowly ticking day of mild discomfort and mild boredom. It's been literally YEARS since I've been bored.

Bored time is good time, I've come to learn these past few days. Bored time is devoid of the ever-rushing, gotta-check-off-one-more-item-on-the-to-do-list, frantic, busyness that consumes my life. Bored time allows you to take a step back from the busyness and analyze it. Is the busyness actually getting me anywhere? Or just keeping me from being bored? Is boredom the preferable state?

I remember being 7 years old and out of school for 2 and a half weeks with the chicken pox. I remember that same frantic feeling that I was going to fall behind (stressed out at the age of 7!) Then again, I remember my teachers sending my new reading book home (my reading group had just finished book F and started book G!) along with a packet of work. I read then entire reading book in one week and whipped off the work packet in record time. I remember finding it actually quite easy, and not nearly as difficult as I seemed to find the work when I was as school.

I also remember baking cookies with my mom and after the pox dried up to the gross, scabby stage, she took me to a matinee to see The Rescuers as a get well treat. I remember those two weeks of second grade better than just about anything else in elementary school.

Similarly, over the past few days, I've been thinking about how things don't need to be nearly as difficult as they seem to be. Just like book G, neither work or life seemed too hard; not as hard as it has been.

Tomorrow I'm back to work, back to "slay the dragons" as my dad always says. The fever has broken, the nausea and headaches are gone. But I'm hoping that the bored-sick-detatched way of looking at things sticks around for a while