Health is the Only True Wealth

Health is the Only True Wealth

I guess my immune system is out of practice after this last year of isolation. When I am fully vaccinated against the Covid 19 plague, I sashay joyfully out into the world and boom! I get dropped unceremoniously into my bed, laid low by who knows what. But not covid. An unrelenting fever for weeks. A myriad of lab tests. Never had such an experience before.

I have heard stories of creatives who put out masterpieces while confined to their sickbed. This is not me. I never lose my desire to do all the projects I have going, but the energy to actually do anything is just not in the building.

At such a moment, you weigh how important these projects even are, really. You start to think about telling those around you what to do with your stuff if you drop the body and have no need of it. You realize that this stuff will outlive your body.

One thing I can do is be grateful for what a supportive web I have around me. You find out who loves you. You don’t regret any of the love you have given, made, and shared.

I get weird and phobic, not knowing which thing I did might have caused this awful disruption in my body’s ability to do its miraculous day to day balancing act. If I ever get better, I will never do (whatever) again!

It helps to cast out a line of hope into the future. I see myself, many years from now, doing this or that thing to which I aspire. Then I anchor to that place and let it reel me in.

Sometimes, says my friend, it is nothing you did. There is group karma, the hazards of living on a sick, disrupted planet. It is not lost on me that while I am suffering the longest fever of my life, my side of the continent hits the highest temperatures ever recorded. Completely off the charts. With hundreds dropping dead all around with heat stroke, it seems trivial to note that this is also the moment our home energy efficient heat pump air conditioning breaks down.

Everything is connected. We have to fix the whole system. This means personal day to day choices, and group decisions to create shared systems of life support that are healthy.

We can do this. It is simple: All we have do is want to, decide to, and insist.