Soul Of A Sick Body

2024 Author: Harry Day | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 15:43

When the body gets sick, the guiding lines of the soul float. Illness is a collision with the imperfection of one's own body, it is never on time or at the right time. This is always a kind of break in reality, the need to immerse yourself in what usually remains in the background and seems self-evident - your own hard-hitting physiology. Feelings about the occasion can be strong and sudden - disgust on the verge of horror, despair, powerlessness, confusion, endless anxiety.

Often there is a feeling that a glass suddenly appeared between the world and his own life - the sick person continues to see his old world, but cannot participate in it, as before. Everything seems to be in its place, but at the same time it has changed almost beyond recognition.

In ordinary life, our attention is directed outward, it is directed to loved ones, friends, work, hobbies, and if inward, then, rather, to our own emotional experiences. The disease, on the other hand, capriciously and cruelly takes away all possible attention. The disease becomes the center of a person's own universe. And he rewrites its laws at times with such speed that all resources are spent on adaptation to new internal and external conditions.

With the course of the disease, the range of feelings can change. It depends on the forecast and on the hope. And these are very different things, sometimes running counter to each other and logic.

This is a very difficult experience - when an adult, who quite recently could manage his life well, is suddenly forced to look at the doctor and wait for him to tell him the prospect of his own life - its foreseeable segment or much longer.

Everything may not be critical at all, the prospects may be quite favorable. But in any case, if a disease pulls a person out of their usual life and makes them live according to their own laws, then this is a specific and multifaceted experience.

Disease is a time of unambiguous slowing down. In addition to painful sensations in the body and the inability to make plans as before, in this unplanned slowness there is every chance of encountering something that a person usually prefers not to see in his life. It may be a not entirely satisfying relationship, a job that takes up too much space (or has no prospects), an abandoned hobby, some feelings for yourself and others that you managed to restrain, or a feeling of emptiness.

Illness is often the time of an internal audit and inventory. A census of existing experience. If you allow yourself not to run away from this state internally, then in a leisurely sickness you can send some stories of your life to the archive. And from some to blow off the dust and re-read.

It's complicated. It takes courage to use this time in this way. Because there is a very great temptation to spend the whole illness in irritation and resentment against the universe, constantly adjusting the time and your own recovery in order to quickly return to the usual course. Get into your familiar life again.

Could be so. Only after spending this time of illness there will be no important experience. It takes effort to make it happen. And understanding what can be learned from these days, since they happened.

The disease confronts a person with himself. With the way he is, and not with the way he used to think about himself. And this is an endless resource and an impossible subtlety - to see yourself mentally naked. To recognize in this imperfect naked soul - your own.

The disease always deepens. It is impossible to leave it the same. It is possible not to recognize the changes that have occurred, but this does not mean that they will not affect future life and self-awareness. There will be. Will invariably be. Inside, new layers seem to appear, which were not previously inaccessible, it seems they did not exist at all. And now - they are already part of their own internal territories. And the choice now is to recognize them as our own or to leave them abandoned.

Paradoxically, illness, by causing pain, enriches. But accessing this wealth is often like laundering gold - it's painstaking, messy, hard, and not always grateful. But the sediment shimmering in the sun is priceless.

But what is surprising is that only after a while you can discover that in the difficult experience that happened, there may be new supports and new meanings that will allow you to see and feel what was previously inaccessible.