Sick is Relative

I’ve been sick for the past few days (sigh, moan, complain), and it’s given me time to lie in bed and think. And one of the thoughts that’s kept repeating in my head is the concept that feelings are all relative. That how I feel when I’m sick might be entirely different than how someone else feels.

In other words, maybe at my most sickest, when I feel absolutely horrible. that’s what someone else feels as “mild discomfort.” I just don’t know, right?The same is true for pain. We all have different tolerances for pain, but maybe that’s also because we all perceive it differently.

From there, you can move on to just about any feeling you’d like to talk about. Love. Fear. Anxiety. Hate. They’re intangible things, and so there’s no real way to know if the thing we’re feeling matches up evenly to what other people are feeling.

I remember when I was in high school, I was in a Dixie Band. We’d go around and play at a lot of senior citizen centers. It was a fun group, and I really enjoyed it. But there were a lot of us, and some of those rooms weren’t large. You get saxes, clarinets, tubas, trumpets, trombones, and more into a small room, and it’s going to be loud. The elderly people didn’t mind: they just turned their hearing aids down. For them, even sound was relative.

So there you have it. My deep thought for the day. How sick am I feeling? Yesterday was “rotten.” Today I’d say “pretty bad.” But what does that mean to you? I have no idea.

Here’s hoping I feel “better” tomorrow . . .

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