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It’s hard to believe the last time I wrote on here I was thrilling about sickly cup cakes, I feel like I would throw up if I ate one today. Come July, I’d been working furiously for ages, trying to wrestle the last six chapters of “State of my Heart” to the ground; I was stressed and anxious, though I was drinking so many cups of coffee I didn’t notice how I was feeling. The last week of last month was especially bad: To say it was crap is something of an understatement.

A few weeks down the line, after a week’s stay in hospital and enforced rest at my parents and still not ready yet to get back into my “normal life” and despite the queasy feeling on my stomach I am going to reflect on what I thought before I got ill – God willing – it will speed up my recovery. This is what I was thinking at the height of “Tour De France” mania on July 18th:

This morning I was about on the computer this morning in a rage and found what I wrote almost a year ago (What makes late summer so impossible?) “What to Do if You Think You’re Falling Apart”:

‘1. You carry on.  Say to “hell with it, I’m going to carry on doing what I’m doing, and ignore everything else.

2. Or you give up.  Go and jump off a bridge or a tall building or something.

I don’t see the point in the latter so what about the first?’ See link.

And I went on to quote Mark Cavendish. Well, I suppose there’s no ignoring one’s own advice! Though I think the Dutch cyclist Johnny Hoogerland from this year’s Tour De France sums up things well this year.  He bravely carried on with what is reckoned to be one of the hardest races in the world, despite being ripped to shreds after falling into a barbed wire.

“The Tour de France has been a dream of mine for ten years,” Hoogerland pointed out. “I have to keep on smiling. I’m still in the race, so why would I cry?” See link

Thirty three stiches – ouch excruciating – and he not only kept the polka dot jersey for a couple of days he completed the entire 3,430.5 kilometres of the twenty one stage race.

Rudyard Kipling also had something valuable to say on the matter:

If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew
To serve your turn long after they are gone,
And so hold on when there is nothing in you
Except the Will which says to them: ‘Hold on!’

Tags: anxiety, falling apart, God, Johnny Hoogerland, Mark Cavendish, Rudyard Kipling, Tour de France 2011