Twelve days wiped off from my calendar

Happy New Year dear Hiveans. This is my first post for this year.

Like Rip Van winkle I woke up to find myself lagging behind by twelve days. I've been taken ill for months at a time but I've never really woken up to having little or no memory of what happened during a bunch of days in between.

On the 21st of December I went shopping for Christmas with the hubs. I had a long list of cleaning, baking cooking and even a bit of decorating on the charts and did some extensive shopping. However, even as we reached home the hubs wasn't feeling too good, I looked after him for two days when the same kind of symptoms hit me - fever, shivering, cough, cold and sever body ache. It was like any normal flu at first. I hoped to recover enough to be able to get up and at least cook up a decent meal for Christmas when the boys came home.

Christmas day came and went by with me hardly being able to prop myself out of bed. The boys ordered some food and after forcing myself to eat something I just threw up. We make plans all the time but life has its own way of telling us that our plans don't always matter.

I am very positive, I like to focus my energy on the positive side of life. I've seen enough negativity in my life to go down that lane. I've been there and done that, I've had enough of that to last a life time.
However, I am realistic enough to understand that being positive is not about wishing that only the best would happen in my life. I know that it is about taking life as it comes and being able to enjoy the positive side of everything that comes our way.

After barely eating anything for a couple of weeks, I decided that I wanted to go out for a drive. Seriously it was pushing things over the bend, but after being stuck in the house for days I decided I needed some fresh air. Somehow the hubs drove us around and we got out at the lake for a walk. My legs turned to jelly after the first few minutes. I never knew walking was such a tough exercise until this moment.

Walk I did, even if I had to drag myself around as this was my smart idea. The beauty of that lake, the calm and the cool morning sun took my focus off my legs to the magic of the place. There were ducks of every kind, the brahmini kite and a couple of kingfishers were enough to keep me walking. However, the physical endurance finally reached its limit and I had to get back to the car.

I decided it was time to have breakfast after hardly having eaten for days. The bitter taste in my mouth made everything taste like crap, but I tried. The food I ordered went back the way it arrived. I might have taken a couple of bites before I decided that I wasn't very hungry. It wasn't as if the food was bad, the hubs and the boy did justice to the food. It was just me who felt that the food tasted awfully bitter. How often we allow the bitterness inside to color our experiences outside.

Life isn't a bitch as some people say. If there were no bitches there wouldn't be any puppies for kids to play with. Life is a mixed bag, we just need to learn to take the good with the bad. The bad may just be our personal experience. I have written in some communities and
have found that the experience wasn't very good, maybe it was because I don't fit in, who knows, or maybe it was just bad timing.

Good or bad is just our perception, I know this for sure. We can have plans, they are good but expecting life to work according to our plans is foolishness. Expecting every plan to materialize is foolishness too. Being able to accept that some will happen the way we planned and others won't is wise. That doesn't mean we don't have to be organized. We need to have plans in place, but yet be ready to take life as it comes.

What is 12 days in a life of perhaps 70 or 80 years? A mere two weeks or even less, right? Maybe these 12 days were the much needed rest that my body required. Speaking of rest the twelve days I spoke of as being wiped out were actually spent sleeping, I slept and slept some more like I haven't slept in years.

Life is strange, we may not understand everything that happens but we can appreciate a lot of things about life. Expecting life to follow our plans may not show enough respect for the greater scheme of things. Learning to take each day as it comes and enjoy each moment as it is, is the best way to handle life I think. 12 days wiped off the calendar was made up with a walk around the lake. you don't think so, maybe some of the images here may change your mind. What are your views on the subject?

All images used here belong to me and cannot be used without my written consent.