Everything that normally gives us pause in the day to day, all the thoughts and actions that so typically consume our lives, all of them are put completely on hold when the body suffers. Intense physical pain without relief makes the rest of life seem distant and almost unimportant.
However distant it may have seemed, there was never a time in my sickness when I did not wish wholeheartedly to be reunited with the trivialities of my day to day existance.
It is often in those trivialities that we find some measure of peace.
A fever is essentially a fire that consumes the brain, and there are times when the peak of delusion seems so close that one wonders how one could retain sanity. Sometimes we do not. In this case, I did retain lucidity throughout the height of the fever, although there were certain times when I wished to slip into the depths of madness. However, I did not.
I considered, perhaps, the cyclic nature of the universe, and that the fire burning within my own body was somehow spiritually providing warmth to someone somewhere at a different time or place, perhaps even myself.
Of course, the rambling visions of the sick are of little consequence to the healthy. That is the beautiful thing about being healthy. What matters is simply what you choose to make matter, and in comparison with the fires of injury and the quickening step of death with each passing year, all concerns are trivial.
It is the commonplace and the everyday that alleviate our worst nightmares.
So as I regain my health I will try to be more thankful to that which I generally take for granted: the trivial and commonplace.
I pray for all of your health and well being.
