Since I came off the bike last week, I’ve been very sore.  Shaken and stirred. The timing has been bad.  The Easter break is hardly finished, and let’s face it, getting injured or sick after the holidays is such a cliché; it’s like saying ‘the cheque’s in the post’.  Yeah, right.  And because it’s a cliché, it feels transparently fraudulent even when it’s true.

My injury was fairly simple, if extremely painful and somewhat delicately placed – just your standard-issue, blunt-force trauma to the gentleman’s area.  My kindly GP, Doctor Schuman, took a look, whistled softly and recommended I take a break from travelling to work, so it’s been rest vs. bruises and swelling since last Wednesday.  It’s still pretty ugly but rest seems to be winning.

I still don’t really feel better though. Not completely. Because taking sick leave so soon after returning to work from the holidays has made me feel guilty.  Now, I know I’ve done nothing wrong.  Believe me when I say that in other parts of my life I’ve done plenty wrong and I have plenty to feel guilty about, but in this, not so much.  Even so, it has ached like the injury itself.

The feeling that I ought to be at the Museum has nagged at me, even while I’ve been working at home on my computer.  Yesterday I went to the doctor’s again, filled with the powerful sense that I was wrong to be away, and faintly ashamed of not being better sooner.  I reckon most of us have felt that.  It’s weirdly irrational.

In the Bible, Job expresses the feeling exactly.  It’s a double whammy: ‘If I am guilty,’ he says, ‘woe to me’.  ‘But even if I am innocent…I am full of shame’.  Perhaps it’s just part of being human, but it’s horribly destructive.

It’s also completely unnecessary. Jesus knew that you can’t be happy when you feel guilty and ashamed all the time, so sometimes he just told people he met and who needed to hear it that their sins were forgiven, without blaming, without shaming, without pointing out fault.  He knew that getting rid of guilt is like getting well.

I needed to know that over the past few days.  So when I get back to work later this week, I’ll take responsibility for the things I do wrong – but I’ll try to let go of the things that are beyond my control.  It’s a long lesson if you’re a slow learner like me.  But it’s kinder, I think.

‘Even if I am innocent…I am full of shame’ is a thought that continues to dog me. This is a Pause I need to revisit periodically, perhaps especially now as it’s going up while I’m furloughed from work and don’t really know what to do with myself.

That was a horrible bike accident, by the way.

The image is a detail from the Last Judgement in the dome of the baptistery of San Giovanni, Florence, designed and executed by the Franciscan Fra Jacobus in the second quarter of the the thirteenth century.