I've been fighting off a cold for the past week or so, and it finally got the best of me. So I have succumbed and am slowing down and letting my body mend.
May was so busy, so hectic - and now, in June, the pressure is off... and instead of being energized, I get sick... Strange!
It makes me think of a conversation I once had with a student from Bosnia a few months after the civil war there had ended. He came to class to inform me that he would be away for a while. He was going back to his country for a few weeks to see his mother who'd had a heart attack.
Throughout the war she had lived alone, he said, cut off from her children who lived in the same city, but in the opposite side of town. They couldn't see each other - war was raging in the center of the city - and they couldn't pass. So she was there alone. Now that the war was over, they were re-united again, but ironically now she is sick in the hospital.
Imagine how hard it would have been if she'd had a heart attack during the fighting, I said. She would have been totally alone.
That's the strange part, he replied. During the war, people didn't seem to get sick. They were strong. But now since the fighting has ended, there have been so many heart attacks, especially among older people.
During the war, they were tough. But now that the pressure is off, the stress they lived under before is taking its toll.
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