I woke up this morning with a sore throat and dizziness; this usually happens when I have an allergic reaction to something. In this case, it may be the dust. I didn’t clean the apartment well when I arrived, and I think all the air conditioning and fans I have had going this week has loosened all the dust.
It’s incredible how our physical health can instantly impact our mental health and how we feel prepared or ill-prepared for the day. With a job where I have to speak in meetings a lot, I am not looking forward to it. Each time I swallow, I want to go back to bed and rest. It could also be that I need rest and an actual vacation. I haven’t taken a real vacation in years. In the past three years, I have primarily taken extended weekends, but nothing where I could unplug for an extended period of time. I think my body is telling me to slow down and rest; I may need to listen this time.
I decide to make myself a tea and look out towards the water. As I take a sip, I think of how it would have been years ago with different ailments and how people would have handled the pain without modern-day medicines. When something is normalized, it is hard to realize when we take advantage of it. Today, I am grateful for the cough drops I brought just in case something happened. Had I not had them, I would have had to walk to a pharmacy to get some, in which case, I would have probably just ended up living with the pain because the energy I would need to exert to walk in the heat would have been too much. It’s such a ridiculous thing to feel sorry for with all that is going on in the world, but pain is relative and situational. We use a personal baseline to define our pain scale.
I do some yoga and meditated a while to try to muster the energy for the day. I was a little successful, but I’ll have to persevere regardless of the outcome.
