You have to practice being sick, it’s a skill and a craft. To get really good at being sick might take years, a lifetime. Eventually you can pass on the knowledge of how t be sick to the next generation, sitting around the fire, telling stories of the times you were spectacularly ill. Like that time in the mountains, with the fever and the blood. Or that time in the tropics, with the coconut soup and the shrimp. What about that time by the sea, where the wind howled through your bones and laid bare your weakness anew, again, again?
It takes time to learn to be sick. Over the duration of illness, your perceptual faculties attune themselves and discern ever finer varieties of sickness. The difference between a cold and a flu. The difference between heavy stagnation sticking to the bones or the lethargy born of deficient digestive fire. The capacity to gauge the internal chemistry each day, calibrate whether to respond by eating more, less, or otherwise. Is it time to fast? Is it right to drink more bitter herbs? Do you need to take a break from bread or fish?
The trouble with learning to be sick is that there’s no handbook, no manual for it. There’s no theory that prepares you for it. Only intimate knowledge of yourself in sickness and yourself in health delineates the fine gradations of sensation that demonstrate illness’ presence and quality. There are a million systems and tools of diagnostics, none of which replace the internal gnosis. You’ve read every textbook of nutrition, but can you taste the difference between acid and astringent, or feel the way that grapefruit you ate yesterday is changing the texture of your stool?
The skills of being sick are the skills of careful observation and listening, patience, and willingness to be wrong. There is no simulation for being sick. Trial and error means relapse and remission. Being sick, finding the road to vitality, and falling again, again. Getting up, getting knocked over, and getting up again. It seems that you cannot fake it till you make it, either. You can’t think yourself out of sickness, but you can think yourself into it. Not that getting up refers to getting out of bed. Getting up is an internal posture of curiosity and resilience. Being sick teaches resilience, if nothing else.
Like any craft, the process of engaging with sickness as a creative endeavour will yield unexpected results. Being with it, sticking with it, solving problems as they emerge. You can’t learn to make a clay cup unless you make a hundred clay cups. Craft the edges too thick, the bottom too heavy, too thin. Crack a few dozen, find that they’ve shattered in the fire. You can only learn to be sick by being sick a lot, often, for the long haul. You can be a tourist with a flu, but never a professional, not until you’ve been sick for years. At some point you’ll find, maybe, other people ask you about it. How have you been sick so long? What’s it like? There is no wisdom gained in sickness, but there is experience, and there are stories.
You can learn everything you need by being sick, and you can heal. Heal. Healing means “making whole.” Wholeness is the individual way of being. Wholeness is rhizomatic consciousness. You can be healthy and sick at the same time.
You can learn everything you need. You can turn your attention towards anything, and the outcome of that attention is an emergent property. Meaning: you can learn everything you need by turning your attention towards what grows, what is alive, what is serving the mutual flourishing of life.
You can learn everything you need by turning your attention towards service of life itself. You can learn everything you need by giving your attention to health. Health here is the osteopathic vision: the wholeness sourced in Qi, sourced in prana. You can learn everything you need by devoting your attention to what grows in life force.
You can learn everything you need. By asking yourself: who am I? What is it that I need? You can learn everything you need by being willing to change everything.
You can learn everything you need by serving the obligations to the people around you with love and devotion and respect, while also being ready to stand your ground and say: this is my boundary, this is my limit, this is who I am, this is what I live for.
You can learn everything you need. By giving yourself an hour every day to sift through the sea of information (the archive), and allow your attention to wander towards what actually interests you, instead of what you think, ahead of time, should be the thing.
You can learn everything you need by giving yourself a chance to encounter the unexpected and the unknown.
You can learn everything you need by, frankly, dancing in silence. You can learn everything you need.
To become yourself, whatever that means, if self there is. Self again troubles us. You can learn everything you need. By living joyfully as a fugitive, an already revolutionary sick body.
You can learn everything you need by looking at your illness and saying, oh, this is a chance to refuse, and continually refuse, and say no. No, I will not go back to business as usual. No, I am not trying to get better so that I can go back to work.
You can learn everything you need by relying on the generosity of the people around you, who you may or may not have met yet.
You can learn everything you need by walking, and walking, and walking. And learn everything you need, if you trust in your own capacity to learn.