Reset

This last week I was sick. Very sick.
To all the people who know me they understand this is serious. 
You see, I am blessed with the immune system of a Titan.
The last time I was sick, I had a cough, I felt groggy, and I laid on the couch for the better part of the day.
The next day I went to work, perfectly healthy.
My first roommate, ended up with a serious cold he could not shake for a few months. He continually felt like garbage and looked worse for two months.
My second roommate, also blessed with a powerful immune system, was down and out for two weeks. He dragged his butt to work, I think took a few sick days, and cursed my name.
My third roommate, couldn't get out of bed for three weeks.  

I made him chicken soup and tended to his every need.

So for me to be sick for a week is serious!  There have been a few jokes about calling W.H.O for the planet's safety.  No one came to visit for fear of death.  Bless Karim M for his trot down the hall to hand me hot soup and his humorous high speed exodus to avoid infection.  

Sick by my standards: I was bedridden.  I was delirious. I had a fever.  I broke the fever. I had another fever. I broke the fever.  I got another fever - fuck that I went to the clinic.  Chest x-rays for pneumonia.   I took a sick day from work!  I missed two rehearsals!!!! I'm still coughing, wheezing and waiting on chest x-ray results. 

The doctor said to me, "Even the Titans need to fall once in a while"
A harmless joke based on my amazing history; but, it hung with me.  It connected to that old saying about getting knocked down only matters if you don't get up.  Or the one about falling off the horse so you can get back on. Or "That which does not kill me makes me stronger."

To me these have always been statements of pushing forward and fighting against the thing that knocks me down.  Of being able to stand up and fight harder than that which put me on the ground in the first place.  I'm a bit older now, I don't turn to violence, mentally or otherwise, nearly as often as youthful me did.  So while I thought about falling Titans (lying in my bed wheezing) I wondered, "why is it important Titans to fall?"

So they can calibrate, so they can understand what knocked them down, and fortify against that in the future.  It is not about the fight. It's about hitting the reset button so new information can be assimilated. A computer loads a program, it shuts down and reboots with the new working system.  Well I needed to get sick to assimilate, to load the new program, to understand what "sick" means, to remind myself of the empathy and compassion for those in my shoes and worse, for the growth and character it builds to go sleepless because of coughing, for the experience of getting up again.

How does this effect my actor, my artist, my creative self?
I ask you, I ask me, I ask the world, 

When do we as artists reset to assimilate and make what we have learned fully part of us rather than some concept taught by a teacher, a peer, a you tube video?  

Find yourself in the reset - grow and create.