Having my very first (this year), very special, not so happy allergy “attack”. Nothing too wild, except that I can not see with one (left) eye and it looks as if the skin around my iris would like to burst any second now, oh, and I can not close my eyelid. Nothing serious really. Not both eyes. It does not hurt anymore, at least not the way it did just a few minutes ago. So things are turning for the better. I completely forgot about my allergies. They got so much better here in New York. Did I mention that this is one more reason why I love this city? It does not give me 10% as many allergies as I used to get in Hanau, in Germany. There in mid May, cars get a neat coat of yellow pollen. I remember not being able to breathe, bad asthma attacks. It is not a good thing when it is so difficult to breathe that the things begin to dim and that there is this certain mild sense of panic.
My allergies were gone completely once I moved to New York. They were really gone. I did not realize that I spent the first two years in an office, working like a madman, 16 hours a day. Every day. Nature was the picture on my desktop. So once I started to understand that this “life” will cost me my life, and once I started to get out of the office again, the allergies came back. Not as harsh as in Germany or in Poland, not quite so bad.
The swelling on my eye got better already. I am able to close the lid now. Tiny happy pleasures. Closing the eyelid is certainly one of them. There is this famous Adam Mickiewicz quote, the first few lines from Pan Tadeusz - Ksiega I

Litwo! Ojczyzno moja! ty jestes jak zdrowie;
Ile cie trzeba cenic, ten tylko sie dowie,
Kto cie stracil. Dzis pieknosc twa w calej ozdobie
Widze i opisuje, bo tesknie po tobie.

Or in (almost plain) English:

O Lithuania, my country, thou
Art like good health; I never knew till now
How precious, till I lost thee. Now I see
The beauty whole, because I yearn for thee.

Not that I have lost Lithuania (guess why my name is Witold?), or lost health, it is just in moments when the body overreacts, or plays some tricks on me that I remember that whatever we perceive as the background, the status quo, the day to day body experience is quite a miracle we should always be thankful for. Really. Being able to walk and talk, me being able to write this, you being able to read this. It all is quite a great, fantastic, unbelievable miracle. This is why it is incredibly important to see the beauty in the tiniest, most normal things.
Swelling almost completely gone.
Now I can think much more clearly. Or so I think.