Off-centre

It is interesting how even the slightest of illnesses can throw one’s life out of balance. There is nothing like being ill to remind me of how fragile my body actually is.

I am extremely fortunate that I don’t get sick very often, typically constrained to just a few times in any one year, but when these times do arrive I tend to go down pretty hard. This was last Friday for me.

From the moment I woke up, I immediately knew something was off. There was a heavy blanket of lethargy sitting on top of every attempt to move, despite the fact that I had just woken up. Not a good start. The sun was up and rising, but neither my mind or my body was up to the task of seizing the day. I decided to take my time, starting where they were instead of where I had hoped they would be, then got started with the usual morning routine, one small step at a time. Progress.

I found that it was irritating to move around too much, so I tried to avoid it, but I also did not want to be wasting the day (as much as possible). I tried reading, but kept feeling unfocused and distracted. I made a coffee and then sat down on a bench outside, one that was being soaked by the early morning sun. I then aimed my eyes upwards to focus on the sky and switched on a podcast. This, finally, engaged me sufficiently. I spent a few hours like this.

The rest of the day included other stop-start moments, all attempts to figure out what could or could not work for this day. Overall, the day had felt incredibly long and time passed very slowly — this was actually a beautiful gift, a contrast to what the days normally feel like.

Being off-centre, while thankfully few and far in-between, are important reminders of how mortal one is. Of how fragile the mind and body can be, and just how little it takes to throw everything else in life into disarray. For me, it is so easy to take the basics for granted, a healthy body that allows me to go running regularly, a healthy mind that allows me to learn as I want to — it is not until they start behaving abnormally that they become noticeable and stress inducing. The paradigm cracks and splinters, for much of the rest of life depends on these two fundamentals, among others. Priorities get re-shuffled immediately, recovery being at the very top and everything else, even the ones that were previously considered urgently important, gets passed to the bottom of the stack for the time being.

There are ancient lines in a book called Letters from a Stoic by Lucius Seneca (4 BC — AD 65) that speak directly to these experiences.

No moment is exempt: in the midst of pleasures there are found to be springs of suffering… sickness assails those leading the most sensible lives, tuberculosis those with the strongest constitutions, retribution the utterly guiltless, violence the most secluded. Misfortune has a way of choosing some unprecedented means or others of impressing its power on those who might be said to have forgotten it…

It would be some relief to our condition and our frailty if all things were as slow in their perishing as they were in their coming into being: but as it is, the growth of things is a tardy process and their undoing is a rapid manner… it is not only the works of human skill and industry that the passing days demolish. Mountain massifs crumble away, whole regions have subsided, the waves have covered landmarks once far out of sight of the sea… the works of nature herself suffer…

‘Teach me,’ he said, ‘the easy things,’ to which his instructor answered, ‘These things are the same for everyone, equally difficult for all.’ Well, imagine that nature is saying to you, ‘Those things you grumble about are the same for everyone. I can give no one anything easier. But anyone who likes may make them easier for himself.’

How? By viewing them with equanimity.

- Seneca

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