Reflections on Sickness

I’ve been thinking about how in my sickest days what I wanted was not to continue to live but to reep the benefits of what comes with living. Most of the time the maintenance of living is subconscious and when it enters into the consciousness it is a nuisance and is suffering. It takes away from our freedom to do what we please. It distracts us from what we desire to absorb ourselves in.

Being sick reminds us all too well of our mortality and distracts us from the timeless immortality that we are in when being absorbed in the world. For how many times have you been doing what you like and not even realize how the whole day has gone by? Oh how when one is suffering or bored the times seems to last for ages!

When one is performing some kind of action, whether it be running, thinking, or reading one is going with the flow of becoming. People even describe situations where one is performing what they love to do as being in the “flow”. One loses oneself in the flow.

But when one feels the sickness and death come near, one feels a resistance to his freedom. One feels the sucking away of one’s life and power to do what one wants. Only after one has experienced the sickness and suffering can one begin to appreciate the way the body fights to stay alive against the forces of dissolution so that we may continue become what we choose.

Truly, each and every time I become sick, it inspires me to do research during this downtime to prevent becoming sick in the future–I check my diet and make corrections to any imbalances I had, and I focus on becoming healthy again. I don’t believe it presents me with my own mortality, as I’m confident that I have embraced the possibility of death on a daily basis. I simply believe it slows down my progress, and prevents me from reaching my goals as quickly as I could before.

Some say that the joy lies in the journey, not the destination, but you can’t even journey when you’re sick.