Ponder

It has been more than three days since I returned from a cruise of the Mexican Caribbean, and I still feel as if I am contained on a vessel that is floating, bobbing, and plowing its way through the vast ocean waters. Somehow it took less than one week for my perception to be altered from that of a land-dweller to something living atop the waves.

The night after returning to the drought-stricken land of Texas, I mentioned my symptoms to some friends.

“I have been so tired and I’m dizzy and woozy,” I said while making googly eyes and holding my arms out in front of me to illustrate the act of trying to find one’s balance. One friend questioned vertigo, the other said “No, isn’t that called sea legs or something?”

Sitting on my bed later that night, it was as if I was instead sitting on the small twin bed inside my cabin on deck M aboard the Carnival Ecstasy. The walls and floor of my room seemed to be shifting up and down in a gentle swaying motion and my brain felt like it was doing the same thing inside of my skull. With these symptoms persisting for more than 48 hours, in addition to my friend’s mentioning of a possible diagnosis, I decided to google the term “sea legs.”

Not one to overly worry about seemingly-minor health concerns, I confided all of my trust in the medically-sound Wikipedia. While scanning the article I learned that sea legs is a common and minor experience of recent cruise-goers and is also called land sickness.

When I read the words “land sickness” on my tiny iPhone screen, they looked strange. When I said the words to coworkers at the office today, they sounded stranger. And when I write the words right now, they maintain to be a strange pair, even stranger than the words  “sea” and “legs” resting right next to each other. And though I’m no longer worried about my symptoms, I have been thinking an awful lot about the concept and causes behind this condition.

How could a human become sick simply from having their feet planted on land after a brief rendezvous with the sea? While seasick on the cruise, I looked forward to the feeling of walking on solid ground. So why am I so nauseated and fatigued and out of it?

After considering these questions for awhile, I’ve decided that perhaps land sickness represents one of the beauties of being human. We have evolved to adapt so well and so quickly to the many different situations we somehow end up in, that if I ever wanted to, I could spend my life on the ocean, eventually with no need for Dramamine, day long naps, or white bread to quell my nausea-suppressed hunger.

People actually do live out there, on oil rigs and boats and ships, sometimes for fairly long periods of time. People live in space too, and even they learn to adapt to a zero-gravity environment. But because nothing, no matter where one has lived in the past, feels as good as lying on hard dirt and green grass, I hope my body soon remembers that I am at home.