I am not good with pain. It dulls my senses to joy. An almond croissant no longer cheers me up. It can actually cause more pain as I am fighting the agony of strep throat. It hurts to talk. My communication with the kids is reduced to encouraging nods and exaggerated smiles. No yelling or nagging. They might prefer this kinder version of mom.
It is the worst time to be sick. I am on sabbatical. I am supposed to be productive with these precious non-teaching days. The prolonged sickness has chewed away my patience and I start counting my opportunity cost. Literature review day. Gone. Meeting with Jessie about model modification. Gone. The chance to submit my revision before Christmas. Totally gone. The more I count, the more anxious I become.
Thankfully I have enough self awareness to realize how unnecessary and foolish my anxiety sounds. This is the best time to be sick. I have no lectures to give and no students to accommodate. A pause is all that is required. I surely have a hard time doing that.
In his inspiring Ted Talk, Bruce Feiler shares his tough year battling cancer and how it was “a lost year”. He said the biggest lesson out of his journey is “the idea of pausing”. His motto for his girls is “Take a walk with a turtle. Behold the world in a pause”. I don’t need a turtle. I have David. On our walks in the neighborhood, he stops and gets off the bike just to pick up a leaf, a pine cone, a rock, or a cicada shell. On our ride to school, he points out the moon, a plane, or a pretty tree. If I miss it, he insists we turn around and go back. Children don’t need a pause. They are never racing against time.
I break the rules when I am sick. Two mini ice cream cones after breakfast, or Chinese stand-up comedy (脱口秀大会) before noon. Distraction and noise are my goto pain relievers, but should I try and learn to be still, in pain? On a quiet afternoon, I worked on my Bible Study and then French lessons, while Chris was on the other side of the dining table working on his computer. We didn’t talk. The only movement in the room was the sunshine that poured in through the big window. I have not found more healing power than those two hours of stillness.
This paragraph from the book “Ten Ways to Destroy the Imagination of Your Child” explains it well:
If our children learn to be comfortable in silence —– and worst of all, in silence when they are among other people they love, feeling their presence nearby without needing to say a word to them —– then a door will be opened that it might take many years of careful schooling, overexposure to the jitters of electronic media, and inundation under the inanities of breathless news that are not news, to shut. For in that deep quiet of the heart we hear things. We hear that the world as we know it is passing away. We are passing away. Yet the world is beautiful, and good is no illusion. Evil is the illusion; it is weak, a shadow, a parody of good, a specter. We seem to crowd many years into a single instant, or we call an instant years later, as if it were present now in all its power and life.