I woke up on Saturday of the Easter Weekend with a slightly scratchy throat and an achy body. I thought little of the aches since I had done a few very tough yoga classes in the preceding week (and I am a little past my prime … well, in some ways). I thought the throat was odd, though, since I had not been around anyone who was sick, nor had I felt cold.
Anyhoo I carried on as normal, did a lovely 4.5km walk on the mountain in the morning and went for a swim in the sea at Oudekraal in the afternoon. An invigorating day, you might think, except that I could hardly keep my eyes open between. The lethargy started to make a little sense when the rest of the cold/flu symptoms came in hard and fast. By 8pm I was in bed feeling like it was the dead of winter.
I had a horrible night and woke up on Sunday morning feeling terrible. I spent the day in bed. Worse than feeling so unwell was that I felt desperately sad too. I was a weepy and inconsolable, miserably confusing for one who is normally of a sunny temperament, and a dreadful business for the beloved.
But !Eureka! in the course of the next feverish, fitful night (Sunday) things started to make a weird kind of sense when it came to me that this was an anniversary gift of sorts. This horrible lurgy started a year to the day since I received the news (totally out of the blue, too) that I was being shafted from a job where all feedback I received was very positive.
So, a year in to my new post-fulltime-employment life, I am reminded of a few things beyond the precision with which the body keeps the score:
How bleak it is to have the rug so roughly and horribly pulled from beneath one’s feet.
How much there is to be gained during a break, even a forced one, from life on the treadmill.
How I wish I had known some of what I know now when that news was so clumsily and cruelly delivered to me.
If you have been made redundant/retrenched/knifed/axed/please fill in a few questions on the link and/or share with any friends who might fill it in too:
