32 Always having what we want may not be the best good fortune. Health seems sweetest after sickness, food in hunger, rest when we’re weary
Heraclitus was probably writing this in opposition to the ideology of his time; it’s equally uncomfortable in ours. I doubt if Heraclitus was expecting his readers to go out and try to get ill, any more than I would advise anyone to ignore the rules on avoiding coronavirus.
This saying isn’t advice, but a reflection on the reality of our human condition. Anything we have all the time, we begin to take for granted. When something new and good comes into our lives, it’s difficult – no, impossible – to keep on celebrating it in the way we did at the beginning. It’s a law that applies to anything, to our material circumstances, to our relationships, to our health and wellbeing: we get so used to things being as they are that it’s only their absence which makes us realise what we’ve lost.
Losses over the last few months have been of different kinds, but few of us have escaped without any sense of losing something. Living with loss is one of the hardest pieces of work for the human psyche. The loss of bereavement is the greatest, but at every level work needs to be done, not to ‘get over’ our loss, but to find out how we can continue to live with it and through it. Let us not underestimate how much there is to do, for ourselves and for our communities.