Sick of Saudi

Well actually it's more like Sick IN Saudi. Both are correct but the latter better reflects my current situation.

Anyway, I have come down with the flu. This may not seem like a big deal, and ordinarily it wouldn't be, but I seem to keep getting sick. I am not going to claim to that person who NEVER gets sick, but I certainly wasn't the person who is ALWAYS getting sick. Now apparently, I am.

The problem with being sick here is twofold. First off, there are limited cold medicines you can take. This being the country of restrictions, the cough medicine is well, in my humble opinion, absolutely useless. I can go though an entire bottle of this supposed remedy and still cough up a lung. The second problem is that there is no where you can go and get a decent meal (a.k.a. no Whole Foods or Traders Joes from which to buy soup, the canned stuff just doesn't cut it). So here I am left to my own devices and as such resorting to mac and cheese and panadol.

I feel like I have gotten sick more often and for longer here than I ever had before. My dad thinks its psychological, others think it's environmental, I think they both might be right. I do believe that our state of mind does ultimately affect our physical well being, but living in a house that is constantly covered in dust and has serious mold issues can't be helping either.

Whatever the cause may be, my cold/fly induced psychosis has got me to thinking. We spend a lot of time thinking about how our lives could be different. The constant "what if?" that seems to drive our day to day existence. There are moments we look back on and want to change, other we want to relive and still others that we simply wish had never happened.

It's kind of odd, but sometimes I think that if some of the bad things that have happened to me hadn't happened, I would actually be worse off than I am now, which is certainly not how I felt when I was going through that. I wonder if this place, this moment, will also be one of those times. I mean I could probably sit here and list all the things I would change about my life here. I'm sure we all could. The grass always looks greener and all that jazz. But how many times do we actually sit down and think about how this hard moment, this particular difficulty is actually teaching you a valuable lesson?

And let's face it, it's the lessons that we don't necessarily want to learn that are the hardest to grasp, but once you actually do get a handle on that thing that seemed so obscure and far away, you wonder why it seems to difficult to begin with. The biggest obstacles to our own happiness is ourselves, so perhaps it's time to actually embrace ourselves for who we are, and accept that for better or worse we are exactly who we are supposed to be at this very moment.