Being sick is stupid, but here we are. After a busy weekend—two dinners out with my parents, a lovely afternoon watching the LaGuardia High School musical, “Into the Woods,” and the usual climbing and running—I am officially under the weather. It’s not terrible: My body aches, and my stomach just feels off, though I’m not racing back and forth between bed and bathroom, and at any moment I might need a two-hour nap. As sicknesses go, this is about as minor as it gets while still requiring that I rest up and refrain from challenging labors, from which this reasonably high-quality newsletter is apparently exempt.
But like I said, it’s dumb, and it’s maddening. What element or action pushed me over the edge into illness? It’s easy to pinpoint running, since I ended yesterday’s long run with a final block-long sprint and felt the twinges in my stomach almost immediately after. Except that I’m not sure things actually work that way: Can a single 32-second-long overexertion instantly overwhelm your immune system? If you are a doctor, please let me know! But I have a feeling the answer is no. Whatever was brewing in my guts and in my blood must have been fermenting since before I woke up that morning.
Did I come into contact with something on the subway, or in a restaurant, or at the show? Maybe! I try to wash my hands when I can, and I hear that is supposed to help. Did I get a version of the germ that’s been making Jean sneeze uncontrollably the last week or so? Maybe! Do I just have the bug that’s going around, as Sasha theorizes? Maybe!
With illnesses like this, and with many that are more dire (like, say, melanoma), you can drive yourself crazy trying to pinpoint a proper cause—especially since, after all, there’s not much else to do when you’re spending days lying in bed to recover. You pore over every choice you’ve made for weeks, or decades, and wonder if that dirty-water dog or that overlong day at Ballston Beach was the root of your present misery. This hunt is typically frustrating, not least because it speaks to our desperate desire to inhabit a rational universe, where effects have traceable causes. We want to know—to believe—that things happen for a reason, and when that reason eludes us, the cosmos goes askew. We know there must exist a cause, but with something like this, it seems to occur at the quantum level, where two realities—sickness and health—exist simultaneously until we get sorted into a timeline where the universe must choose one or the other. Somewhere, in a physics textbook from the distant future, there is a table of those quantum probabilities, but you’d need a Ph.D. to understand it, so until then you’ll rely on a different, more useful kind of doctor.
The fruitless pursuit of an unknowable cause almost makes me long for a pre-scientific era, when we just blamed God or the gods. It’s such a tempting answer in the face of uncertainty: I must have done something wrong, so now I’m being punished! Thanks to my hubris—i.e., acting as if divine rules do not apply to me—I am being reminded of my humanity, my mortality, my fragility. With an illness as minor as today’s, it definitely feels like the gentlest of heavenly reminders to perhaps rein in my ambitions.
Which is not going to happen! Once I’m better—24 hours from now, I hope—I will be back out there running too hard, cooking and eating too hard, reading and talking and writing more than anyone can put up with. If there’s one thing that defines me, I’d like to think it’s that sense of ambition, that willingness to try with whatever force I can muster, and then try again. And if the effort occasionally lands me in my sickbed, so be it. If there’s one thing I know how to do, it’s how to overdo. The gods can’t take that away from me.
And now it’s time for a nap. 🪨🪨🪨
