Saluting the flu.
On initial reading, this sounds quite perverse and bizarre.
Who would actually be thankful enough for flu to salute it?
Yet this is the sense I find myself currently sitting with, being thankful.
Perhaps not of the flu symptoms themselves – no, they have been truly awful in the full sense of that word. When each new day brought with it new levels of physical distress.
The pounding headache, the being so overly hot that you feel freezing cold and cannot get warm, the shivering, the coughing so much, the aching joints, the nausea, the overwhelming sense of impending doom, and the snatched moments of sleep, those blissful moments when you are freed from the pains….
Yet all these symptoms, the physical pains, the internal battles, are signs that life is clinging on, fighting hard to regain physical ease and return to proper health.
In the midst of hurting, there is the effort to return to ease.
In this, I also hold that emotional hurt can sometimes be the evidence that the actions against us, the abuses that cause us this pain, are not of us at all….
If they were of us, if they were exactly the same as us, then there would be no pain in the actioning of them.
That we can sit with unease shows that we do not agree with what is going on around us.
If we agreed fully and entirely, then there wouldn’t be any disagreement – It would all just fit so well that there would be no discomfort at all. The body, the mind, the soul, wouldn’t fight hard to reject, to push away.
So, in the symptoms of the flu, there was always the fight – the symptoms might even be the fight to return to health.
And maybe in knowing the fight, we can also know the peace afterwards, and we can hold our gaze firmly on that.
For all those fighting flu, fighting that internal unease that tells us about things that are wrong, I salute you, and hope that your peace of health is near.
Rosalyn Young is a qualified mental health nurse with 30 years
Experience in govt and private agencies helping those in crisis
and in recovery. She has studied counselling to degree level,
and specialises in working with survivors of childhood abuse
and neglect, PTSD, DID, and emotional regulation problems.
She lives in Lincolnshire with her husband and a variety of
companion animals, is a brewer of mead, and student of
growing things in the garden.
