I’ve had my fair share of bouts of illness which can last up to months and months, and I know many other who go through these bouts too. These bouts leave you feeling as though your soul is being slowly drained away, you can’t sleep, you can’t eat, you can’t work, you simply can’t function. But what is worst about being ill, it that sometimes you can not see the light, and the thought of being well again is alien…an employer’s dream ehh. Well, this is what it is like when being ill for a long time. Along with the feeling of “will I ever be well again” the worst thing for me, is when I am not longer able to read, and with any illness, for many, this is a tough thing, especially when all that you can do is watch the zombifying TV. But why have I chosen to talk about this today? Maybe it is because every now and then, with a bout of illness, whether it is gastritis, mumps or influenza, there are at times little glimmers of light, and today, there is a little light as I am able to step away from article writing which I am completely on top of, and edit my book which I have now titled “Shadows”. February is always a tough month, it has been months without any real sun light, and by now, all that we really crave is a little warmth. So what I am saying to all of you out there, who are in the fits of illness and submerged under it’s looming darkness, hold on in there, you will get out.

I will now leave you with a few extracts from Virginia Woolf’s “On Being Ill”

“Considering how common illness is, how tremendous the spiritual change that it brings, how astonishing, when the lights of health go down, the undiscovered countries that are then disclosed, what wastes and deserts of the soul a slight attack of influenza brings to view, what precipices and lawns sprinkled with bright flowers a little rise of temperature reveals, what ancient and obdurate oaks are uprooted in us by the act of sickness, how we go down into the pit of death and feel the waters of annihilation close above our heads and wake thinking to find ourselves in the presence of the angels and the harpers when we have a tooth out and come to the surface in the dentist’s arm-chair and confuse his ‘Rinse the mouth- rinse the mouth’ with the greeting of the Deity stooping from the floor of Heaven to welcome us… Novels, one would have thought, would have been devoted to influenza; epic poems to typhoid; odes to pneumonia; lyrics to toothache…All day, all night the body intervenes blunts or sharpens, colours or discolours, turns to wax in the warmth of June, hardens to tallow in the murk of February…But all of this daily drama of the body there is no record. People write of the mind…”