Observing symptoms

Having just had some enforced time out through illness, and given that you’re human and you’ll be doing the same at some point too, it would be remiss of me not to share my observations. Here are three for you:

1. Doing nothing seems hard

I’m not telling you anything you don’t already know here, but my word are we programmed to be doing!! Take ‘doing stuff’ away from a fully conditioned human, and the wheels feel like they’re coming off, pretty damn quickly.

Even when I was sick as a dog, incapable of putting my mind to anything vaguely work-related, I noticed the mind still looking for something to do. Anything but nothing! Watch TV. Listen to music or an audiobook or a podcast.

(At about this time, my wife’ll be dropping in to suggest I take up knitting: The Panacea 😉)

📦🗣️: “Don’t make me just BE ill!!” it says.

And I’ve written that it ‘seems’ hard, because it can’t be, really, can it? How can resting—not doing anything—be difficult?

It’s the opposite of hard, surely?

🤔

We’re funny creatures, us humans; the things we’ve learned to accept as ‘normal’.

2. Being, with symptoms

Look, I get it. Distraction is pretty effective—no bad thing!—especially when the alternative is… fully experiencing symptoms.

🤢

It’s just that there are limitations to using distraction as a technique in general. Because, as with all coping mechanisms, there’ll come a time when you can’t rely on it (or it becomes unhealthy/an addiction).

And then you’ll have a baptism in the fire of ‘just being’.

🫣😆

I discovered this, lying there in my pit of illness. I’d actually had enough of distraction, I couldn’t handle any more. I needed to rest; I needed sleep.

📦🗣️: “If you get some rest, you might feel well enough to write a quick Daily Reminder, afterwards,” it says. 🙄

I mean, FFS. How about we just rest, eh? That’s clearly what’s required here.

I lay there, but I couldn’t sleep because I felt too nauseous.

😑

Then I got a bit curious about that word – ‘because’.

Is that really why I couldn’t sleep? Haven’t I said before that there are only ever two things keeping you awake? Which was this?

🧐

On the helpful-harmful scale, this one looked ‘harmful’. Nausea looked ‘bad’. Something to be avoided. Something to get rid of, before I could indulge in that most natural of processes: sleeping, when you’re knackered.

But nausea was just happening. It was out of my control. If I was going to be sick I was going to be sick – freaking out about nausea, or focusing on it as a reason for not sleeping wasn’t going to change that.

It was a life sensation, like any other.

So I zoomed out a bit. Took the view of the non-judgemental observer of the nausea. And then out a bit more, taking the view of the observer of the observer. (Feeling like you’re at death’s door is the perfect opportunity to try this stuff! 😆)

I can report I didn’t have any major revelations about the nature of existence or anything, but I did fall asleep pretty much straight away, lol.

I woke up 45 minutes later feeling less ill, picked up my phone and immediately developed a pre-migraine aura, with dancing lights stapled to the fronts of my eyes. Ten minutes later I’d lost the entire left-hand ⅓ of my visual field and that’s when I decided I needed to listen to life and hit Pause 🖲️ on the Daily Reminders.

🤷🏻‍♂️

3. Energy & enthusiasm come back

In a way, unpleasant though it may be, I do hope you’re as sick as a dog when you’re reading this, because it’s that version of you—the sick one—that needs to hear this.

For if you read the statement ‘Energy & enthusiasm come back’ from a place of wellness, it’s so frickin’ obvious, it’s almost insulting.

But in the same way that you can’t reason your way out of a low mood, when you’re feeling low energy, or listless, it’s impossible to reason your way to the opposite.

Because of this:

It’s all we know, right there and then. Nothing else is real. The mind slams us into the always and never corner and nothing else seems even possible.

But of course it’s a nonsense.

Why?

Because who we are is energy! Enthusiasm, or En- theos, is Greek for ‘the God within’ – the same power within that is producing whatever symptoms you’re feeling, and allowing you to be conscious of them in the first place!!

That’s not going anywhere, so you can bet your bottom dollar that the experience of energy and enthusiasm will return.

Remember this. Bookmark this page. Do what makes sense.

Here I am, with a smile on my face, writing again, when all was lost.

😁

Giles

Related

The two things keeping you awake

The solution to sleep problems is about as counter-intuitive as it gets. 🛌💤

The Daily RemindersGiles P Croft