Writing while sick

Should you do it? Or not? Maybe this post will give you an answer.

Photo by yeongkyeong lee on Unsplash

I’ve been sick since Thursday. Since I can’t do the things I normally would on a Saturday afternoon, I have no excuse not to write.

The past few weeks have been a whirlwind of conflicting emotions. I was out of town for much of early August - two separate trips to Chicago, one to Kansas City.

I’ve been thinking about my place in the interfaith world, marriage, work, my “evolving” faith journey, and now health.

I “wrote” two “poems” today, something I usually don’t do… or haven’t since I was in high school. One was as I was showering and am afraid has been banished to the dustbin that is my memory. The other I had the good (or bad!) fortune to have captured as I was journaling.

Home is not a place.
It is a feeling.
A panoply of memories.
A longing for once was.
A tug.
A reminder of where you are ultimately heading. 
Back to God. 

Is this a poem? Maybe not, but since my brain is not functioning as it typically does, I’ve been more ruminatory than I usually give myself the space to be. Unable to formulate actual sentences or even the appropriate word, I jotted down a few things that came to me as I thought about my dad, visiting the Prophet’s Mosque, and my memoir.

I can’t do the things I normally do — and perhaps that’s a gift.

On Thursday and yesterday, it hurt to talk. It reminded me of the blessing it is to be able to speak.

Last night, I had difficulty breathing. It was yet another reminder of the blessing it is to be able to breathe without assistance.

This morning, I woke up congested all over. I couldn’t taste the usual flavors of my chia seed pudding. What a blessing it is to be able to taste, to even have the ingredients in my fridge that result in my chia seed pudding.

That is what a gift is -- freely bestowed, and also something that can be taken away. Some might say how callous it is to take a gift away! But who are we to make the rules when we are its mere undeserving recipients?

In my last post, I wrote about terminal illness — without using those exact words — and whose lives matter. My temporary illness — I seem to be getting better — is yet another reminder. The lesson is different. But every painful moment comes bearing gifts, if only we can see them.

If I was still having difficulty breathing, I would not have written that paragraph above. Thankfully I am doing better. But that sense of loss is still very close and it’s not fully gone.

Being ill is being in a state of liminality - between the stages of life and death. Every moment is a moment of transition.

Oddly enough, my mind travels back to the first time I learned about the the theory of kasb in Ashari theology. While kasb is an attempt to explain human beings’ moral responsibility for their actions while affirming God’s omnipotence, the way I understood it (perhaps incorrectly) is that the act was created by God, but in the moment when man stood at the threshold, he reached for the act and then it became his own. That moment at the threshold is also being in a state of liminality.

Where am I going with this post? I don’t know. Maybe it was a bad idea for me to write while sick. But at least I wrote. I did something today!