Briefly...

...I keep thinking about those people who do stuff when they're sick. I mean stuff like climbing Mt. Everest or running their first marathon. And I mean sick like cancer.

Now I have a legitimate reason to feel just the teeniest bit sorry for myself. I'm not responding to the antibiotic I was given and feel truly terrible again, so bad that I just spent the past 15 minutes engaged in bitter internal debate about whether I could--should--write "sick again" in lieu of what I am writing.

But the truth is, I'm not going to write much more than this, and I can manage this, think it's probably better in the long run to push through it than let myself off the hook without a fight. But those people, those really, really sick ones? I guess it's yet the umpteenth example of the importance of relativism and perspective. I guess if you knew you likely had only a finite amount of time left, your desire to do something impressive with or in it would likely rise.

But I personally think it's interesting how for me, being just regular old sick, intensely so, but not in a way that doesn't seem recoverable, makes everything nearly intolerable, from walking, to pouring a bowl of cereal, to sitting through a meeting, to typing at a computer. It's hard for me to imagine that if, god forbid, faced with that kind of scary sick, I wouldn't be quick to throw in the towel, back to the bed, prone for the duration. With TV and treats.

This sounds a bit pathetic. Not to mention that it makes me seem on the whiny side of the street headed toward the land of the precious and lame. But as I sit here, coughing and feeling--I admit it--more than just a teeny bit sorry for myself, this is what I am thinking. And about how absolutely amazing and impressive and inconceivable it is that someone who feels a hell of a lot worse than I do right now, with a lot less reason to think their situation is impermanent, could muster up the motivation to get up, and then try to push themselves further than it seems they could go.

I admire this spirit. I see it, in different incarnations, in people I know sick and well. It has something to do with living being about asserting one's aliveness, and with there being value in sometimes making yourself do the thing, whatever it may be, the thing, you aren't quite sure you can do.