I am very thankful that all I have is a sore throat, a throbbing headache, and low energy. I’ve run into this kind of sickness before, like almost all of us. It’s just another sinus infection/cold/low-end flu type of event.
But it’s so easy to forget what we had just hours before the symptoms.
In the onset of the sore throat, my mind viscerally pulled up decades of experiences with this temporary pain. It’s as if my mentality shifted intoSickness; do you remember those times that you get sick and you just think it’s going to last for the rest of your life?
And then you get better, and can only distantly think of last week as “that time I was sick”.
To me, the Sickness <-> Health shift is profound. In Health, I can barely appreciate my healthiness—it’s just the default way of being (for me). And once Sickness strikes again, I can barely think about the times of Health, only those times of phlegmy migraines.
How do we forget so easily our times of pain and our times of joy? We normalize these states so easily—maybe because we’re such an adaptable species.
And even with such a proclamation of profundity, I can’t speak much more on the topic. I feel this concept, but can’t express it any further. Probably because of the headache.
I’m not a religious person but the word Grace entered my vocabulary as of late. For the religious, it may be defined as the favor of god through blessings—“God give me Grace”; my own definition parallels such a definition, but instead of being given Grace, I am having Grace: a state of accepting experience, bad or good, as a blessing.
In Sickness, I attempt to have Grace; I accept that this experience, no matter how annoying or painful, is a blessing for wisdom. Experience begets wisdom. If I lived only a healthful life, I would be unwise to a great portion of human existence, which is sickness. I would be missing out on such great insight into the human spirit!
In the face of the Great Unknowable—god, as you may have it—and the events that result from the Unknowable, I must have Grace. This state is key to learning about my surroundings, my body, and my emotions.
How do I know that I have Grace when running into challenges in my life? A litmus test:
“Am I ready to learn from this experience?”
If yes, then I may just have Grace, whether it’s just a bit (begrudgingly knowing I have to learn something without yet going about it) or a lot (feeling on the verge of great new knowledge and wisdom from this experience).
If no, then I don’t have Grace, because I don’t feel ready to elevate this experience to a level of contemplation. At that moment, I’d rather react, blame, and obsess over the experience. I can feel the my mind spinning around, unable to find any grounding. I don’t even know where to start in any attempt to learn from this situation.
So I ask myself, “Am I ready to learn from this sickness?” Yes, I am.
My partner gave me some oregano oil to take twice a day, followed by honey. It burned and didn’t taste great, but probably 10-15 minutes later, my throat felt in better shape than it had before. Now, when I’m running into these kinds of throat bugs, I’ll remember oregano oil and honey! And if others are similarly sick, I can have them experiment with the remedy as well.
Operationalized, Grace to me looks like resilience. I think of those times when the work turns into drudgery but we can still joke about it and do the work to the best of our ability. Or when someone is injured and can’t do what they love for months or years, but they continue to have the determination to grow even more than they did without injury.
The common denominator behavior I can see for “Graceful people” is that they have the capability to act as an example for others even when they have to work on their own demons. The best of us are active learners, finding new ways around challenges and always better equipped for the next challenge.
It can be easy to ride Sickness out, and when it’s over, just think “Well, that sucked. Sure hope it doesn’t happen again.” But we can also choose to cultivate Grace in these situations with an ever-learning mindset that makes every challenge the Unknowable throws at us just as useful as an inspirational class lesson.
Thanks for reading,
Dom