It was bound to happen, I rarely escape it. I have been in various states of not feeling well for a few weeks now. Yesterday, I was just plain sick. Today I think I might make it through this, and live a while longer yet. But those feelings of getting better were just few three or four second flashes in the ocean of I feel bad.

Getting sick is always interesting to me. Especially the flu. Whenever I get the flu, I relive every bang and bump that I experienced since the last time I had the flu. I don’t know if everyone feels those bumps and bangs a second time or it is just me. When I almost smashed my finger in a car door last winter and it throbbed for a few hours? It is a given my finger is going to hurt for a few hours just like it did when I almost smashed it. So on and so forth, one bump, pull, and hurt after another. For some reason the only thing that does not hurt again is any dental work I have had done. Or maybe among all the other hurts, it just does not stand out because it was not painful to start with. It is like my bodies pain memory has to be flushed from time to time.

It took me a number of years before I could tell the difference between a bad cold, and the flu. I am not sure yet I have it right. When I get sick, but not too sick I decide it is a cold. If it is from my neck up I decide it is a cold. If the first few days, I am feeling very bad, and by the third day I am looking forward to dying so I won’t hurt, I decide I have the flu. There is one last give away sign, I am never hungry with the flu, nor thirsty.

I am now on day three that I have actually felt bad. My nose is stuffed, then runny, my body hurts, and I have chills, and hot streaks. I don’t feel like I am going to die though, so I suspect this is just a cold. Also today instead of wishing I would die so I did not hurt, I had about 20 minutes of starting to feel better.

There is not a lot of difference in the way I treat either one. I am not a doctor fan, nor a pill person. Usually I try to rest, and take aspirin, drink fluids and stay warm. I think almost all seasonal illness we get goes away on its own just as quickly as it does when we pump ourselves with things we think we need to make us feel better.

I used to hate getting sick. Now I understand that just like my spiritual self, cold’s and flu’s are using my body as a survival mechanism. They enter into it, use it for a few days and once they determine they have had ample opportunity to be spread to others, they allow themselves to die off as they have completed their function of procreation of a new generation. Thinking about colds and flu in this aspect allows me to tolerate them better.

There are other times when I become ill, and feel terrible for a brief time, usually less than 24 hours. I do not always think this illness is physical, but somehow spiritual. My body or spirit is getting tweaked for some reason. Sort of like brining your car in for a tune up, or installing a new version of Windoze on your computer. It needed some modifications from where it was at.

Of course all of this is just my thinking at this point in time. Maybe in a few years I will see illness as something different. But for right now, thinking about being sick in the manner I described works for me, and makes the reasons for being ill to start with understandable at some level.