It had been my imagination that breaking a part of my body would have it’s advantages. In a sick way I thought it would mean having the time of my life. Before I broke my wrist last week I had been secretly wishing for such a thing to happen. I wouldn’t have to go to work. I could just sit at home all day, watching the telly while eating crisps and chocolates and drinking tea. And writing a lot of weeklies of course. How more wrong could I have been.

Breaking a wrist apparently and unfortunately doesn’t imply 6 weeks of spare time. Even the most critical doctors told me I could just resume my work as usual. As long as I took some more breaks and were more careful and calm. On top of this, of all times this week, my first week back in the office, was going to be one of the busiest weeks of my working year. With a lot of things that needed taking care of under my responsibility. Or which I wanted to be my responsibility. Still, it would have been quite bearable if it hadn’t accidentally been the same week in which both my best friend Maia and boyfriend Matt decided to celebrate their birthdays and had to be bought gifts for.

Any spare and extra time I had was spoiled by the illness itself. Did you know that healing a broken bone means you have unpredictable periods of tiredness and concentration problems? I didn’t. Nor was I prepared for rushes of fever and a less effective immune system letting come through a nasty cold. Let alone a set of fingers resembling a green and blue rotting potato.

My brilliant bubble of thought up activities while recovering from a fracture had burst. And somehow time seemed to fly at enormous speed during those days. I was short of time constantly.

It’s a fact that time seems to go faster when you’re busy. Like they say: time flies when you’re having fun. The same thing, though inverted, happens with time when you have to wait: one minute can feel like an hour. And there is an urban myth, scarcely funded on empirical research, that time speeds up when you’re older. But could time be perceived as faster while somebody’s ill?

I did some research but found nothing other than woolly types with weird stories about healing and using time to transform into a new and improved human being and so on. Maybe I’ll get back to those stories some other time. But for now I was only curious whether my healing process was partly responsible for the feeling of time flying by. A bit of thinking provided me with a few possible reasons on why time really flies by faster when you’re recovering from an illness.

Suppose a human being has a certain amount of available thought channels in their brains. Some people more than others. All those channels can be applied to conduct a certain task. Occupied means occupied and therefore there’s a definitive limitation on how many tasks somebody can handle once at a time. This way you could say that healing is a real activity, exactly like working, or talking to somebody or cooking or whatever. It may not have been consciously, but I have been busy. Not my mind, but my body. Consequently, I was a bit more busy than usual. So the clocks seem to tick a bit faster.

Furthermore I had these concentration problems. I couldn’t really focus on anything I did. This way I had both a less sufficient overview on the entire list of tasks and less focus on each separate thing that had to be done. I probably worked less efficiently, thus doing less in the same amount of time. And through the loss of control I felt more stress and perceived myself as more busy. Only to speed up my perception of time even further.

All of those possible reasons somehow make sense. And none of them had crossed my mind before when I still thought breaking something would ensure a jolly good time.

This leaves me with realizing I had been quite naive to wish for a fracture. I wish I could go back in time to adjust my point of view and this way maybe prevent my self-fulfilling prophecy. But although we’re able to change the speed of time towards the future, going backwards in time unfortunately still remains impossible.

Column published by Cecile on Monday, March 12th, 2007.

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