I’ve been ill for almost exactly a week. I’ve been describing it as a cold. That may have been a mistake. A cold can be be miserable, uncomfortable and, maybe, even need a day or so in bed, but not the disabling assault that I have been experiencing, where half an hour to do something I absolutely have to do is paid for with a collapse into a mildly delirious state of immobility for several hours.
But, this is the bit I am curious about. While doing a simple task like writing a simple e-mail took on the attributes of a mission like climbing Everest or crossing the Sahara on foot, the periods of lying flat on my back, neither sleeping nor fully wakeful, seemed to release a flood of creative ideas that will probably keep me going for several months ahead as I work out their viability and their implications.
So here is the paradox: for most of this week I have been staggeringly unproductive in terms of actually producing stuff, with a mind like a bucket of sludge whenever I sat down at my computer, but in the drifty periods of collapse among a whole lot of misty weirdness there have been the moments of laser like clarity where some really sharp ideas appeared. So a time of both stagnation and fertility. What strange creatures we are.