Today is the first day in over three weeks that I have felt like myself again.

I exercised. I cooked. I cleaned my bikes. I meditated. I watched some interesting videos on AI. I watched a Trevor Noah comedy show. And I reflected on my life, especially the last three weeks.

For precisely 21 days, I had been unwell.

I woke up on the morning of the 9th May weekend with a slight pain in my throat. I realised I was coming down with an infection. I was teaching the Happiness Program that weekend, and the commitment kept me going. I was also speaking a lot during the course. By the time the program ended on the evening of the 10th, my throat had gone into a downward spiral.

The joy of teaching the Happiness Program sustained me through the weekend.

Then Monday came, and I was completely drained.

I decided to work from home.

The next few days were mostly spent in bed. I put off visiting a doctor, hoping the virus or bug would pass on its own. By Thursday, when I was only getting worse, I decided to start a course of antibiotics.

While the antibiotics lasted, I felt marginally better. But once the course was over, I felt worse in many other ways. I lost my appetite. A dry cough became unbearable at night. I moved through the day with extreme tiredness and had little energy to do anything. I couldn’t even think about exercising. I was unable to meditate for more than a few minutes because sitting still would trigger a coughing fit.

How then did I deal with the situation?

In acceptance.

Since I couldn’t sleep lying down, I kept myself propped up. I read a lot because, apart from my day job, I had to cut down almost every other activity.

I rediscovered the joy of reading for hours at a stretch, sometimes late into the night, especially on weekends when sleeping was difficult.

I read a fast-paced Harry Bosch detective novel, a book on ultramarathons by the legendary Scott Jurek, a World War II historical fiction novel centred around a bookstore in London during the war, and a book on the science of longevity.

More importantly, I was forced to withdraw from social media, especially WhatsApp, because I had very little energy to give to others.

In the process, I rediscovered something I had lost.

The joy of reading without distraction.

Lately, I had found that whenever I sat down to read, my attention was constantly being pulled away by everything else happening in my life. But here I was, reading for hours on end with complete immersion.

And this was while I felt completely devoid of my usual impulses—to ride my bike, to exercise, to reach out to people and inspire them to meditate.

I felt listless about almost everything except hanging in there and meeting my work commitments.

Even as recently as yesterday, my appetite had not fully returned.

I do not remember going through such a long period of feeling ineffective across so many dimensions of my life.

But I simply stayed with it.

In acceptance.

Through the entire experience, I let things be and gravitated towards something I could do with very little effort: reading.

It wasn’t something I consciously decided to do.

It was simply a discovery.

A discovery of what remained possible when normalcy had temporarily deserted my life.

And today was the first day in a long time that I felt like myself again.

Perhaps that is one of the purposes of our spiritual practices.

Not to ensure that life unfolds the way we want it to, but to build the resilience to cope with what happens and remain open to discovering what life has in store for us.

I share this not because overcoming a bout of flu is some great achievement. It isn’t.

I share it as a reminder that when we stop resisting a situation and accept it as it is, we may stumble upon something unexpectedly beautiful.

Something new about life.

Or perhaps something old about ourselves that we had forgotten.