SATURDAY, 27 SEPTEMBER 2025
Battled with fever this whole week, stuffy nose, cough … but the worst were the nights: hot, muggy, and because any breeze would have made my nose even more congested, no fan or air conditioning.
A person’s immune system protects you from germs and viruses that are constantly on your case, pursuing you on every turn 24 hours a day, seven days a week, waiting for the slightest chance to penetrate your defences and make you sick. Lower your weapons for a moment – like sitting in front of a fan with wet hair, and your fortress is overrun.
Same with your mental immune system. As long as you’re relatively healthy, and everything is working as it should, you can also fend off most of the mental germs and viruses that want to undermine your emotional well-being. But the moment a general weakening is detected …
There are so many things going on in the world that one has to try to make sense of. So much violence, and crime, and corruption, and political leaders sending people to their deaths and then congratulating themselves on a job well done. And there are personal memories from ten years ago, and twenty years ago … memories of your childhood. Memories of when you had a fever in another city in another country. And then other memories from those times also seep out that you keep carefully packed away most of the time. And all these mental germs and viruses rush through your gates as you struggle in the small hours of the night to get some sleep before the sun comes up.
It ages you. It changes you.
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