The Advantages of Illness

[robinturner]

We are often told by alternative health gurus that illness is a message from our bodies. Usually the message is “Slow down”, though I suppose it could also be “Now might be a good time to write your will,” or for people whose bodies spend too much time in chat rooms, “omgwtf!!!” I’m not sure how true this is in biological terms, but it strikes me as a good attitude to take anyway. (Philosophically-inclined readers may remember Wittgenstein's remarks about bees.)

In this case, I definitely got a “slow down” message. I had a mild fever on Saturday, but since it was gone by Sunday, I thought nothing of it, and foolishly worked until 3 a.m. for the next three nights. My body replied along the lines of “Look, I told you to slow down!” and I woke this morning with a burning sore throat, so groggy that when I tried to call our secretary to say I wouldn’t be coming in to work, I repeatedly dialled my PIN code instead of her extension number.

Paradoxically, listening to my body’s messages has made me more productive. Aside from sleeping, today I have:

• finished a translation of a documentary about Anatolian felt-makers;
• fiddled with the CSS of our department’s website so that it now has separate formatting for print-outs;
• released the latest version of the Perl web-concordancer to my Sourceforge site.

Actually, the last one sounds much more impressive than it is, since all the new code had been written by Gregor Sieber over a year ago—all I had to do was tidy it up the comment lines and HTML a little. Nevertheless, I still feel a sense of achievement, since all three items on this list had been on my to-do list for longer than I can remember. Thank you, body.

Comments

[bluesman.livejournal.com]

Howdy, Solri.
When you were at Shrewsbury Arts & Tech College, did you know Danny Keville, Pete Woodin or Paul Merchant? They were there at that time. If so, are you still in touch with them?
Thanks,
Telemeister.

[solri.livejournal.com]

Sorry, those names don't ring any bells. There again, I can't offhand remember the names of any of my classmates from SCAT.

[bluesman.livejournal.com]

Okay. It was worth a shot. Ta!