Lives of great men all remind us
We can make our lives sublime,
And, departing, leave behind us
Footprints on the sands of time;

Footprints, that perhaps another,
Sailing o’er life’s solemn main,
A forlorn and shipwrecked brother,
Seeing, shall take heart again.

Let us, then, be up and doing,
With a heart for any fate;
Still achieving, still pursuing,
Learn to labor and to wait.

The above poem is part of A Psalm of Life by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (a long-named fellow). I memorized it in high school because my English teacher was a Nazi about her students memorizing poems. We’d start every class by reciting them. One line, two lines, one paragraph at a time. Each day or week we’d add on until our entire class had an entire poem memorized. Then it was on to another. Anyway, this particular poem has been on my mind the last few days because I heard someone on a podcast mention it and looked it back up. Sure enough, after just one reading, my mind remembered the whole thing.

Thank you, Mrs. Shipman.

In yesterday’s blog I said I wasn’t feeling great. Well, damn it, I woke up today with a sinus infection. So after breakfast I went hunting for kimchi, since it contains a bacteria (if you’re lucky enough to get a recently-made batch) that’s helped me a number of times in the past . Anyway, we’ll see what happens. If things don’t improve within the next two days, I’ll know I need to go a different route.

Recently I read a book about how to cure, or at least dramatically improve, essential tremors, an inherited condition I, well, inherited and basically amounts to involuntary shaking. My dad’s case is pretty bad–sometimes he can’t hold a cup of coffee–but my case isn’t as severe. Still, I don’t want it to get worse, so I’m trying to learn about its causes and treatments. Back to the book, the author suggests cutting out or drastically cutting back on–coffee, alcohol, liquids stored in plastic containers (like bottled water or milk), and all products containing heavy metals like aluminum (for example, most frying pans, soda cans, and deodorants). And whereas I’ve been thinking about attempting this plan, I haven’t quite been ready to bite the bullet because–in a word–coffee.

Y’all, I gave up coffee after my knee surgery last December for a few months. It wasn’t terrible. I drank a lot of tea. Still, I fundamentally enjoy coffee, so I let it creep back in. By creep I mean that I at first had a couple cups a week, and for the last three months I’ve had–on average–a pot a day. By myself. This, of course, doesn’t help the shaking, nor does it help my sleep patterns. Oh well. I’m not a perfect person.

All this (and I know it’s a lot) to say that when I woke up with a sinus infection today I thought, Let’s give up coffee! Because coffee doesn’t sound good when I’m sick, and if I’m going to go through caffeine withdrawals, I might as well do it when I’m already sick. You know, just suck it up and be one miserable-ass sonofabitch (nothing personal, Mom), which I’m quite sure is what I have been all day today. This afternoon my family had a cookout, and I don’t think I said three words to anybody. Still, this was authentic for me. I felt cranky. I acted cranky. To minimize the fallout, I kept to myself.

After the cookout, I took a nap. That helped. Then I painted a friend’s cabinets for a couple hours, long enough to apply one full coat over the already applied primer. Alas, I’m sure another coat will be needed. Now I’m blogging and doing laundry. Just before I sat down to write, I moved my clothes from the washer to the dryer and hung my shirts to air-dry on hangers. Whenever I don’t feel well (or am going through caffeine withdrawals, or both), I feel generally overwhelmed, so I keep thinking about all the projects I’ve started I haven’t finished–books I’m in the middle of, weight I haven’t lost. I’ve especially been worrying about the short story I started that I’ve yet to complete for the writing class I’m taking and is technically due this Tuesday. Seriously, it may not happen.

Who wants to write when you’re sick?

The line from Longfellow’s poem that’s been stuck in my head is “learn to labor and to wait.” In my experience, the waiting is the hard part. For example, with my sinus infection, there are certain actions I can take, but ultimately I have to give my body time to (hopefully) rebalance itself. With my essential tremors, the lifestyle changes may help, but nothing’s going to happen over night. Like painting cabinets, washing clothes, reading a book, or writing a short story (did I give enough examples?), everything is a process. Poems are memorized one line at a time. And whereas I wish almost everything happened at a faster pace, I’m learning to trust that if one is willing to both labor and wait, the desired results will come. This is the law of the harvest. You reap what you sow.