Come now you who say, “Today or tomorrow we will go into such and such a town and spend a year there and trade and make a profit” - yet you do not know what tomorrow will bring. What is your life? For you are a mist that appears for a little time and then vanishes. Instead you ought to say, “If the Lord wills, we will live and do this or that.”
James 2:13-15
Essentially, what happened last week is that I began writing a very high-powered post on here about how I had three months left to finish my book plus a load of other things I needed to finish and how I was going to do them all and even more than I needed to.
What was I thinking? I was just like the people in the Epistle of James: I’m going to do this, and this, and this. And I’ll have enough energy, and time, and nothing will go wrong.
I actually remember thinking, as I was walking somewhere last week, “If I get sick, or injured, or something happens to me, I’m not going to be able to do everything I’ve set myself up to do because there simply is no margin in my schedule”.
It would take more than such thinking to humble me.
On Wednesday morning, I was trying to sneak in a workout in a time period that really wasn’t long enough. I ended up dropping a 10kg steel weight plate on the big toe on my right foot. Even then, a few minutes after it happened, I started thinking to myself, “Well, this is quite painful, so I’ll probably leave stop workout there, and then get back on it in a couple of days time.” I had a shower, put a plaster over the wound, and got on with my day.
When I took the plaster off in the evening, it was covered it blood and the toe looked pretty gross. I woke up at 2am in pain and couldn’t go back to sleep. I did some research on my phone and found out that the toe is probably broken and it might take 6-8 weeks to heal. So much for a couple of days.
Thursday was an unpleasant day as I hobbled around from one engagement to another. I identified three distinct pains: one just the dull but consistent pain from having a (probably) broken toe, one the stinging pain of the bloody wound on the top part of the same, and the other was a kind of pressure which felt like it was coming from the bruise underneath the nail.
Thankfully it has worn off now although I’m still limping a lot. It could have been much worse if, say, the plate had hit me in the middle of the foot.
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