On Sickness And Reflection

 As noted this past Friday, I was under the weather most of this week.  And when I say "Under", I mean to suggest far more under than I have been for at least the last 7 years.

I cannot definitively tell you where it came from, although I can tell you that the two weeks previous were filled with work, not a lot of sleep, travel over the weekends (One for a family wedding, one to visit The Ranch), and almost zero recovery time between the traveling and my work week.  

I can tell you the inflection moment:  it was a week ago on Monday where I felt sufficiently "off" to not attend the first meeting of my men's small group meeting after our seven week hiatus.  

By Tuesday morning, I was cooked.

The issue presented as a sinus infection complete with drainage, a delightful cough I could feel in my chest along with the wheezing in breathing, and some level of elevated temperature, at least on two of the days.

I naturally (and stupidly) attempted to split the middle by working from home Tuesday and going in Wednesday - which solved nothing, as I felt bad enough to take a complete sick day on Thursday for the first time in years.  Friday I rallied to make it back in with a pretty solid day; Saturday (yesterday as I write this) I essentially sat on the couch encased blankets and read.

7 days for an illness.  Again, it has been years since this has happened.

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The initial response when all of this manifested itself was, or course, a vast sigh of exasperation:  after all, I have (or rather, had) far too much going on to afford to be sick, let alone miss a day of work. Yes, work itself of course, but all of the other carefully crafted allocations of time I had worked in for the completion of all the other things that are (well, were) going on in my life during that time.  There was that initial period (Monday and Tuesday) of working through the "inconvenience" of being ill was my plan.

In retrospect, it was a pretty ill conceived plan.

By the end of Wednesday I had thrown in the towel (holding it together only long enough through drugs to make it through my small group commitment).  Work was not a thought on Thursday and only the barest of things got done on Friday.  And all those "other things" that constitute my life?  Not one of them happened after Tuesday.  Turns out doing the sotto voce version of "Hacking up a lung while upright" is not conducive to training, calisthenics, iaijutsu, language, aerobics, blogging (who knew),  or anything else beyond the basics of eating, sleeping, and showering (a necessity).  Reading was the "But Wait, There Is More" add-on to the deal I did not ask for.

Interestingly, the only person that denoted my lack of progress in any of these areas was myself.

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The fact that I may have been "overloading the carry capacity of the wheelbarrow" was not necessarily a surprise to me.  The subject had shown up a half dozen times in some form or fashion over the last two weeks in my journal.  The surprise - if I can call it that - is that it actually manifested.

(Yes, I know - not that surprising; pushing any system to its operational limits will eventually result in a failure at the weakest point of the system.  Sadly, I also tend to believe that I am often exempt from the laws of the real world. It is a known failing).

Five years ago an event like this would not have set me back on my heels the way this one seems to have.  I am trying to understand that, just as I am trying to accept the fact that if I do not change, this sort of thing is likely to happen again.

To the first point - Why has this set back on my heels so? - I can only think that I have been on the receiving end of health and relative energy for so long that it is something that I have come to take for granted.  The idea of essentially having no impediment due to health and energy  as I attack my rather wild list of things to do has not really confronted me before.  I am, very aware that such good health and energy  are in a real sense quite temporary in the full term of things.  I perhaps did not expect "temporary" to start now.

To the second point - something needing to change - I point back again to my journaling, where for some weeks now I have been making the observation that fitting an ideal amount of sleep for me (which, tragically for my higher aspirations of accomplishment, really does seem to be between 7 and hours a night) is reasonably impossible when allocates less than that amount for actual sleep.  Repeatedly.  For weeks on end.

"Ah" I keep telling myself as sit down looking at my hour calculations.  "Given the amount of time I have to set aside for work and (begrudgingly) sleep, I only have Y amount of hours to do all things I really want/need to do!"  A flurry of calculations inevitably ensues by me trying to find ways to shave off 30 minutes here or there to set aside (the number of times I have designated my lunch for "useful" thing is embarrassing at this point).

And then, something like this happens and reality suggests in a far from cordial way that I might want to rethink things on a more holistic basis.

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Do I have a plan?  Nope, not at all.  I am giving myself the grace of the holidays:  Na Clann will be here this coming week for Thanksgiving (and I will be off starting Tuesday for the week) and then come the holidays when things are generally winding down anyway, including a week off at the end of December.  I can definitely coast on a lot of things until then (except lifting and Iai and blogging of course).

But next year?   Something has to change next year.  The risk of being guttered like this again is not worth it.