In his book, Venture to the Interior, Laurens Van der Post recounts his experience of returning to Africa to explore vast highland areas in South Eastern Africa. It is 1949. He has been at war since 1940, in a Japanese prisoner of war camp for several of these years, and has just returned to England. He wants to settle down, to rest.

However, the Foreign Office tells him that he is the only one who can do this for them. So, after a brief visit to home and family, he leaves for Africa in a speeding airplane.

Arriving in the town of Blantyre, in what was then called Nyasaland, he visits with old friends from the war and before, sitting on the veranda of the colonial club sharing gossip and memories. As he goes to bed that night, he is suddenly feverish.

He does not see it as a physical illness. He says, “I have had fevers of many kinds in all sorts of places and circumstances, and I believe I can now tell when their origin is purely physical, and when it is not.” He sees that this particular fever was preparing him for transformation. “For me, one of the most striking things about fevers is their mysterious connection with our sense of time and space. The fever is either the vehicle itself, or evidence of the means by which one is forced from one time context into another.”

It is as if the fever is a herald of the changes that are coming. In his case, his body has traveled faster than his psyche. He needs the fever to slow him down and center him in time, in all times. Before he could begin his great task, he needs to be centered in the now. “All I would suggest is that the future had begun to register a new design in my blood and that the fever marked the beginning of its struggle for awareness.” (p. 105-106)

This is true of many illnesses and fevers that come upon us unexpectedly. Our bodies and our spirits are out of synch and are not living in the same time. Illness and fever, by taking us out of our time and into all times, allow our bodies and our psyches to come together anew for whatever important task lies ahead.