The sacredness of sick time.
Well, hello there, stranger.
Ok fine, I know. I’m the stranger here. I haven’t written a newsletter since December 2022.
I’d love to say I was on a long retreat, divested from hustle culture so thoroughly that I didn’t even notice the time. But actually I got sick, friend. Really sick.
There have been some “not-enough” thoughts coming around as I begin to write. You weren’t quite sick enough, it says. (If "not-enough" were a person, she'd be looking down her nose at me over the rim of her glasses, filing her nails, lips pursed.)
Oh, but I was. For about five months. Though there were and are people sicker than me. And while I’m much better now (and not everyone gets better) I still think it’s worth mentioning here because, statistically speaking – you are, or have been, really sick in the past couple of years. You might still be sick. Or someone close to you was, is, or will be. That seems to be how it is now.
I’ve supported some really rad organizations in strategy around sustainability and wellbeing since the pandemic began. Every single one of them is deep in the question:
How do we work when we cannot assume health - our own or each other’s?
Probably, it’s a question that more of us should have been asking way before the pandemic began. What a relief that some of us are finally asking it now, and finding ways to change how we live and work as a result.
The picture at the top of this email was the last photo I took before noticing that something was off. A selfie from the east coast of Kenya, where I was facilitating a staff retreat for a health justice organization I love, just after the New Year. I returned home to Philly, weeks went by, and I simply could not shake what I shrugged off as jet lag.
“I’m old now,” I announced to my friend Maori. Kenya was my first big trip after lockdown, and the first since I turned 40. The ache in my thighs, collarbones, and skull was relentless. Fatigue so deep, I had to take breaks while walking up the stairs. “I used to bounce between time zones like it was nothing,” I lamented into my phone, head on pillow.
“I think Covid changed us,” she offered gently. But I wasn't trying to hear that yet.
I found myself rescheduling meetings – pushing them back once, twice, three times. Each time thinking, If I feel terrible today, I can reasonably assume I’ll feel better next week. And then, I didn’t. So I started canceling stuff altogether.
In my rendez-vous with diagnostic medicine, I discovered that "post-Covid syndrome" is what you have when:
you have had Covid
are currently sick, and
no one can figure out what the hell else is wrong with you.
So I had long Covid. And as I recovered, I learned I also had burnout, and grief, and that I probably had those things long before the virus laid me down.
Rest is the most powerful remedy. You know what's cute? I thought I was already resting. I was reading Rest Is Resistance! And I had just taught a beautiful month-long meditation immersion, Sacred Evening Sangha, that was all about resting, letting go of the day, and winding down for a peaceful sleep.
Then I saw an herbalist who said that the chronic fatigue was my body saying it needed more. Much more. She put me on a 10 hour a night sleep protocol – rest beyond anything I could have designed for myself. For months I lit candles instead of turning on artificial lights at night – a practice my friend Katherine referred to as my “twinkle time.” I went screen free at 7pm, took a bath and went to bed at 8:30pm, and didn’t get out of bed till 6:30am when my kiddo woke up. It felt both luxurious and ludicrous, and my body responded with a deep YES. I didn’t get my energy back immediately, but my aches soon started to subside.
I don’t believe everything happens for a reason. I do believe that whatever happens, we can learn and grow. (I call these beliefs “God.”)
I’m still learning, growing, and gratefully recovering. My energy is coming back – hence, this newsletter, and the sweetest teaching engagements I could imagine coming up this summer, as you'll see below.
So. How am I working now, that I cannot assume health? Slowly, and with great intention. Aware of what feels draining, and moving toward what feels regenerative, whenever I can. Signing up for less than I think I can handle. Leaving space between absolutely everything. Keeping in mind that all plans are subject to change.
One thing I learned (again) during my recent sick time is that there is something really important to be known from lying down. From pausing, in a world that is hurtling forward at ever increasing speeds. Something about what it means to be human -- about the being that remains when doing falls away.
In Care Work: Dreaming Disability Justice, writer and activist Leah-Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha writes about the hidden blessings of time in bed with chronic illness:
How do we claim this body broken beautiful not as a liability but a gift?
... Part of this beauty is our access to dream time. Time for stories to grow. Time that is not logical, rational, clock time, punch-the-clock time. At thirty-five, I am surrounded by people who say “How do you have time to write those poems and stories, cocreate those projects? How are you so productive?” I am so productive because when my gut tells me to take a day off, I do. I lie, say I have a family emergency. I follow the words out of my belly. I give in to the bed, to the long, long sleeps and times curled up, the words curl close to me because of them.
In the Pali canon, illness is referred to as a “divine messenger” – along with old age, death and enlightenment.
I think these pandemic years are calling us all to a deeper recognition of the sacredness of sick time. Calling us to listen more closely to what messages illness has for us, both individually and collectively.
I remember what Arundhati Roy wrote, just weeks into lockdown in April 2020:
Our minds are still racing back and forth, longing for a return to “normality”, trying to stitch our future to our past and refusing to acknowledge the rupture. But the rupture exists. And in the midst of this terrible despair, it offers us a chance to rethink the doomsday machine we have built for ourselves. Nothing could be worse than a return to normality.
Historically, pandemics have forced humans to break with the past and imagine their world anew. This one is no different. It is a portal, a gateway between one world and the next.
We can choose to walk through it, dragging the carcasses of our prejudice and hatred, our avarice, our data banks and dead ideas, our dead rivers and smoky skies behind us. Or we can walk through lightly, with little luggage, ready to imagine another world. And ready to fight for it.
The portal is still. We still have time.
Buddha said there were 84,000 dharma doors that open the way to liberation. On the personal tip, I don’t wish for any of us to take the door of being sick – but for many of us, that will be one of our paths.
If that’s you – or perhaps I should say when that’s you, since very few of us leave this realm without encountering a major illness of some kind –
When you are sick…
I wish you all the rest that you need.
I wish you the knowledge that your body is doing its best to be well.
I wish you the capacity to make friends with your body. To listen and respond to what it needs. Even and especially when it's not doing what you want.
Some of us get better, and some of us do not. Either way, sick time is a time to learn patience.
Patience till we get better.
Patience if we never get better.
Patience when we lose something we will never have again.
Patience as a pathway to loving what we have today.
So much to love…
Some books that made me happy to lay down:
Care Work: Dreaming Disability Justice, by Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha - for the impermanence of health and ability
Brilliant Imperfection: Grappling With Cure by Eli Clare - for the possibility nothing is broken and there is nothing to be fixed
You Could Make This Place Beautiful: A Memoir, by Maggie Nelson - for the impermanence of relationship
The City We Became and The World We Make by N.K. Jemisin - for the love of fantasy and New York City
The Art of Gathering, by Priya Parker - for dreaming of facilitation that feels more like throwing a great party
and of course...
Rest Is Resistance: A Manifesto, by Tricia Hersey - for eva
