sickness

Avoiding the unavoidable

We are all pretending to uniqueness, I think. In the winter of twenty five I am sick for much of three months. Slow coughs that do not fade, light headaches, stuffed noses, the occasional mysterious fever; each symptom of illness sweeps across me from the direction of our daughter to the direction of my partner. None of us appreciate this pathway, and the months of excellent Hong Kong weather past mostly with sniffles and discontent. We are, in many ways, exhausted, unable to compel our bodies to simply endure.

These are the struggles of toddler-hood, friends assure us. It’ll get better as she gets older.

“We were all sick the whole year our daughter started school,” I hear, which does not carry the reassurance it might, given that we have not yet begun to plan for that next step.

“The winter is the worst,” we are told, as though the season will not come again next year.

We try flu shots, staying indoors, playing outdoors, eating fresh fruit, traveling more, traveling less. We largely fail at the thing that would help most, sleeping more than 3 hours at a stretch. The thin walls, the lack of doors, the uncomfortable plane seats, the strange beds, the late work calls, the early work calls, the toddler, the world, something always prevents a deeper rest, and we pay a knowingly high price.

Fitness suffers, and yet we work out between calls, between travel, between other commitments, such that fitness retains it’s place as the third pillar of our life, after child and work.

We snuggle and hold hands furtively, across her sleeping form on long haul flights, briefly while she naps, or before we start another tough series of calls. We try to grant each other strength we do not feel through willpower alone, and sometimes succeed. In the early evenings we walk through the park to find the children and celebrate the beauty of Hong Kong, of this perfect weather, familiar to those relocated from San Francisco. The tones between 12 and 18 C are our home, and we relish their return, finding hoodies and pants we’d forgotten in Hong Kong’s extended summer sweat. As the sky shifts colors to evening we remind each other how lucky we are to be this tired, to be here and alive, to be parents to this growing human and partners to each other. We celebrate the world and the beauty we have found, even in our partial health, together.

Thus the winter passes.

Sickness and work

October passes in fits of frisbee, sickness, and work. We see friends from distant cities and chase plastic in mud together. Weeks later the fields are still bumpy with the memories of our bids and cuts.

We are sick too, a common occurrence in the fall, especially after sharing water bottles and meals with dozens of friends from cities across Asia. We’re lucky in these illnesses, though we may have gotten them from Shanghai friends or given them to Tokyo friends. Hopefully the folks from Manila and Singapore went home without the horrible colds of the fall of 2019.

In between the high energy days of games and the low energy ones of frequent naps we work. In offices and factories we spent much of our weeks solving problems no one has had a chance to resolve before us. This is how it works in startups, every problem something no one has yet had time energy money or knowledge to fix. In our new roles we bring at least energy, and occasionally knowledge. It is the luxury of a decade in San Francisco.

These are good times, if blurry. I feel that I finally know what kind of year 2019 will be. I hope we will remember the best parts with enough details to grant it length, but am not optimistic. Some years are simply spent this way, building blocks for all of our lives.

Mostly, here in the first faint whispers of Hong Kong’s fall, I am glad to wear jeans for a trip to Shenzhen, the first time in six months I’ve contemplated denim. The seasons return, belatedly, long after we’ve forgotten their feel on our skin.