Sick Day Part 2

28 Dec, 2022

A couple of weeks ago, I skipped the Sunday post in favour of rest. A cold had been kicking my backside and left me in bed. Fortunately, I started feeling better.

Then I got worse.

I never returned to feverish, but every day for the last week and a half, I've spent the first half hour of my day coughing and sneezing out buckets of gunk. None of it brown this time, but still nice and nasty.

I still worked, mostly because my job is a 'sit at my computer and types stuff' kind of job, but waking up in the night to cough several times over doesn't make for a productive state. None of which helped me mentally or physically.

There was no rest Christmas Eve or Day either. We have no kids (story for another day) but there were some last minute things missing from the shopping deliver, a whole lot of tidying up to do, and then on Christmas Day itself we hosted my mum, meaning the afternoon was spent prepping dinner. By mid afternoon, I was dead on my feet.

But then there was Boxing Day.

The house was tidy enough. We had no plans with friends of family. No personal tasks to do, and zero interest in the sales. What we have have thought was a three seater sofa with a right hand chaise, several blankets and duvets, and a house full of snacks.

We watched some more His Dark Materials¹ season two, rewatched Modern Family, and I'm not sure what else because at a certain point I found the exact right way to lean into the corner cushion. My wife said she'd never seen me so comfy before. I crashed for a few hours, and still slept through the night.

And then on Tuesday, we did the same thing, only this time with Frozen 2, the Bobs Burgers Movie, and old episodes of BLEACH².

At one point in all this, I was propped up in the corner, our dog on my left side, wife on the right, and both were leaning their weight against me. It immediately became one of my favourite moments in my life; the feeling of total peace and love and joy enveloping my entire self. The complete definition of peace.

And I want more.

A while back, I had a 'I'm 14 and this is deep' style conversation with a good friend about the toxicity of the Good Old Days trope. You know, when you're sitting around talking about how much better it was back in the day, when you could do X and listen to Y and whatever, as if these things are totally and utterly inaccessible to you now. Assuming that your life situation hasn't totally changed³, it's almost definitely possible to replicate, come close to, or even exceed the feeling you got from your past experiences here and and now. And yet, by talking about it like it's this unobtainable thing from your past, you deny yourself that opportunity.

This is one of those moments for me.

For two days, leaving aside the physical discomfort of a month long chesty cough, I experienced total bliss, comfort beyond which I've ever experienced before, and complete and absolute love and affection. What's more, we both did⁴, and all it took was laying on our sofa and mindlessly watching a movie or our favourite sitcoms. So while I'm not going to sit here and say 'we'll make a firm commitment to do this every Sunday afternoon', because life, uh, finds a way, it is something I'm going to make a more active commitment to⁵.

And that will be expanded on more this weekend, where I talk about my upcoming yearly theme. In fact there'll be two posts this weekend - on Saturday, I'll be reviewing 2022, and Sunday will be discussing my theme for the year ahead.

Oh, and yeah, I'm feeling better. Not healed, but better. Turns out two days of solid rest helps.

Thanks for reading! If you enjoyed this post and want to read more of the same every Sunday, you can subscribe via email or RSS. Mailing list subscribers get a bonus post every week.