By 
Joshua Bennett
As I write this, some mysterious strain of the flu virus is kickboxing my immune system into submission. To be honest, I’m not quite sure where it came from. I’m inclined to believe it arrived earlier this week when I shook the hand of a young man (who will remain unnamed, lest this tale of his germiness make his sickly week even more unbearable) after he received his own flu shot earlier that morning. Foolish choice, I know. Nevertheless, in an effort to communicate male solidarity and an air of situational command I deployed the age-old farewell as I took my leave. What happened after would drastically alter the course of young life. Sort of.
Over the next two hours or so, my insides began to resemble the womb of a volcano. I’m talking muscle aches, astronomical fever; coughs that sounded more like the wails of a dying porpoise. Though several of my close friends (shout out to fellow Vision staff member, Marion Smallwood) went to exceptional lengths to repair my ailing body through the use of TheraFlu, chicken noodle soup, and purple love-joy aura energy, nothing seemed to work. My body had become a car running on empty, Bert Without Ernie, a spoon in a drawer full of forks. Now, while few if any of the previous sentence’s metaphors may make sense upon first glance, you’ve got to understand where I’m coming from here. It’s influenza! Granted, it may not be the Spanish influenza, or even that of the swine persuasion that has relegated much of the Western Hemisphere to the farthest reaches of personal and collective trepidation as of late, but it’s definitely an unpleasant biological experience to say the least.
In many ways, my current bout with the flu has urged to me to rethink what it means to be human, to challenge the traditional lens through which I think about what the human body should look like, feel like, do. Now inhabiting a far more limited range of physical motion and verbal dexterity (anyone who has recently had the flu can attests to its debilitating affects on rapid-fire brain function, e.g. one’s ability to viciously clown people), I have been forced to appreciate the beauty of being still, of laying under a trio of warm, cotton comforters and taking in the music of a New York City street four hours before dawn. I’m a firm believer that sometimes our moments of unexpected physical weakness or illness are reminders from our bodies to slow down and rest more. Surely I can speak for any number of students at Penn when I say that more often than not our weeks are little more than a blur of textbook pages, parties, and PowerPoint slides, a seemingly interminable cycle of sensory overload that drives us to our physical and mental limits without ever offering the possibility of rest and rejuvenation.
So, if nothing else, take this brief recounting of my war with influenza as a mix between cautionary tale and Bildungsroman. May it remind you to be both selective with your handshakes and more generous to your bed sheets, to rest long enough in the middle of the rat race to appreciate the fact that you can run at all. We only get to rent these bodies for a couple decades or so, why not take care of them the best we can?
