I have a cold. A bad cold, not a flu. With humiliating running nose, headaches and general crabbiness.
You might think doctors should not get sick, especially not natural doctors. I couldn’t agree more. But here I am finding myself in bed, unkempt, headachy, sleeping, reading (“The Elegance of the Hedgehog, by Muriel Barberry – marvelous!), sleeping again – and suddenly I feel happy.
I needed this. I needed the quiet, the no-demand, the thinking break.
See, most of the time, we are social animals, defined by what we do with others, for others. But there is, deep down, this other part of ourselves: the unsocial part, the pure soul-being. The part that asks why we are here on Earth.
As a sick child, I was bedridden often. All I did was reading and dreaming.
Paul Gauguin’s most famous picture is a huge canvas, covering a wall, not of a home but fit for a railroad station. It is called: “Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going?” It hangs here in Boston in the Fine Arts Museum and shows South Sea people in their natural state, in their natural habitat. It was this picture that Gauguin hurled into the face of well-heeled, fin-de-siècle Paris.
Those ultimate questions that cannot really be answered have to be asked, anyway. And it seems to me, I do that best in bed, alone, not quite fresh smelling, and confronted with my mortality – yes, even if it is just a banal cold that hit me. I know, in a day or two, I will re-emerge into real life full of energy, deep thoughts for writing and good intentions. I needed this renewal. Read More
Loading…}