The Somewhere Else

This morning, Rabbi Miriam Lorie joined BBC Radio 2's Pause for thought.

Listen here.

I’ll spare you all the gory details, but over the weekend I had a tummy bug. I’m blessed to usually be a very healthy person, and I had my lovely family looking after me, with little concerned faces asking “are you better yet mummy?” periodically. So in the scheme of things, it really wasn’t so bad. 

But Scott, it did give me an insight into the parallel world people are thrown into when they’re ill.  

There’s this brilliant passage in Wintering, a book by Katherine May, where the writer talks about illness as Somewhere Else with a capital S and capital E. She says:

“there are gaps in the mesh of the everyday world and sometimes they open up and you fall through them into Somewhere Else. Somewhere Else runs at a different pace to the here and now, where everyone else carries on.” 

This resonated so much with me over the weekend. The feeling that the world was continuing as usual, but in my little corner, everything stopped, the diary cleared. Priorities were turned on their head because all I could do was let this illness run its course. 

And I know Scott that you’ll have so many listeners who are in this “Somewhere Else”, whether for a short time, or something longer term. For many of them, your show will be their window into the regular world. 

In my own Jewish faith too, illness is not shut out into a Somewhere Else. We bring the names of unwell people into our synagogues, reading them aloud in a prayer for healing. And when it’s welcome and possible, we send food or bring our very selves to visit people who are ill, a practice called bikur cholim. Visiting someone who is unwell can truly lift them, and it can be seriously powerful for the visitor too. 

Although I’m glad people stayed away from me this weekend as visitors could have experienced a different kind of powerful effect…

But for all those out there who find themselves in the Somewhere Else of illness - I hope that the people in your lives, and this show, will keep you tethered to the wider world. You’re not alone.