15 Truths from 15 Days of Flu

15) Listen.  Our bodies are communicating with each of us all of the time – and they’re smart.  They’re real, living, breathing things.  Let’s try and give them what they’re really asking for.

14) Barreling through rarely (if ever?) works.  Through is through.  There is no rushing through pain, illness, disease. You can’t speed up the misery by denying or ignoring it.  The only way through, is through.

13) It’s okay to send our loved ones away.  It doesn’t mean we don’t love them, just sometimes complete concentration on our loved, sad, sick, selves requires our full attention.

12) It’s okay to call for help.  Always.  Being alone can deliver clarity.  Being together can deliver connection.  Both are critical to healing.

11) The Affair, Man in the High Castle, and This is Us are incredible television.

10) Sleep.  A lot more.  That whole “you can sleep when you’re dead thing,” – yeah, spot on.  Let’s not die early.  Let’s love our time.  Sleep is for the living.

9) More mistakes will happen.  Work will creep in.  Priorities will get confused.  Balls will be dropped.  Health will erode.  Though, maybe if we’re more mindful of the whens and hows, we can self-correct more quickly.  Practice = Progress.

8) Soup is good.

7) Juice is good (like the real stuff extracted from actual fruit).

6) Water is essential – tea is warm water with herbs and spices and roots.  Have more of the good, essential stuff.

5) Going outside helps.  When sickness has us down and out, it’s okay (even recommended to stay down), but when we start to come upright, get outside.  Even just for a minute.  Find some clear air.  Try and let it in.

4) Breathing – even clogged, snotty, mucus, blocked breathing – sounds like the ocean.  That has to mean something.  That we make the same sounds of the powerful waves that rock and feed our world. There are tides to life.  Let’s stop fighting and start riding them.

3) My body needs a place…to go and move, and stretch, and be happy, and find it’s own beauty.  Every gym, yoga studio, or at-home fitness program I’ve ever subscribed to, has been done so only after considering convenience and economics.  Both important, but now I’m ready to get real.  If it doesn’t FEEL amazing to go, I ultimately stop going. Time to find a place that my whole body craves.

2) Drugs help.

1) Love heals – not always necessarily what’s ailing us – but definitely what’s plaguing us.  Those fears of being being less than, or out-of-sight-out-of-mind, or valued only when actively doing.  Not true.  The calls from Mom, flowers from friends, attention from those most willing to risk infection just to be near, tell us otherwise.

Here’s to a happy and healthy New Year, which according to the Chinese Zodiac kicks of on January 28.  2017 is the the year of the Rooster my friends, which I (and all my fellow 1981 babies) happen to be.  So cock-a-doodle-do.