So last week I was supposed to have a trip out of town, instead I was taken down by Covid. I'm guessing it's not the first time I got hit but it's the first official one. I got hit bad, but I think it's nothing that most people haven't gone through already.

There seems to be a life-long pattern to my process of being ill that's suspiciously different from other people it might be worth clicking into.

Let's talk about the body and the spirit/mind as the horse and the rider.

When the horse is sick, it stops being able to serve the rider. That's commonsensical enough.

My issue is the rider takes a long time to come to terms with that. He ends up pushing the horse when he should not.

When he has finally accepted that the horse is sick, the rider retreats but is not sure what to do with himself. There's even a temptation to be sick along with the horse, perhaps as an act of solidarity.

When the horse has fully recovered, the rider takes a long time to catch up to that fact. Even if the horse is perfectly capable, the rider acts as if the horse and him and still sick.

The rider lags behind the horse by order of magnitude.

I have a few theories about why.

First theory: the rider is burnt out. He wants more break time. In fact he secretly wishes the horse is down much longer so he has legitimate excuse to stop riding.

Second theory: the horse isn't in situations (social or otherwise) that requires the rider to step up. If I had a job that requires me being performative in public, the rider would've been forced to pick up the slack.

Third theory: the rider has a riding setup so complex that getting back to the horse saddle involves enormous inertia.

Fourth theory: the rider is over-invested in being competent. He is addicted to being able to ride fast and far. The horse being down hampers this addiction.

The third theory is the craziest theory of all, most likely to fail Occam's Razor. Switching analogy for awhile: imagine running a desktop that requires turning on twelve applications at the same time, each one running in a very specific way, just for you to accomplish one particular task. This is a complex setup that you probably don't want to repeatedly perform every morning unless your machine is forced to reboot.

The fourth theory is elegantly simple but it doesn't explain the rider's inertia after the horse's recovery.

The second isn't much of a theory. It does tell me about the reliable ways to yank the rider out of his funk.

The burnt out theory is most scary because of what the solutions can imply.

Even if I'm not in a rush for solutions, it's not clear to me if the rider ought to be perfectly in sync with the horse if he doesn't want to, especially if the first theory is sound.

What concerns me in the long run though is whether the rider will get better at this in his old age. How much can a seventy-year-old rider be independent of his horse? Can he be trained to be happy when his horse is down?