breathing

i cannot capitalize with one hand.

it is sunday morning on clinton street, as everywhere, but this is where i am. my husband is fishing on sauvie's island and i am healing slowly, staying ahead of the pain which is the center of my world for now. it is a footrace i am sure to win. healing is a beginning, and if i abandon my traditional apathy and wax philosophical for a moment, forgive me.

i will do yoga. i will do something. i am willing, at long last, to move, to bend, to stretch, to inconvenience myself, in hot pursuit of a more comfortable future. i am INTO comfort, and it seems that long term ease requires routine periods of physical distress (exercise). i don't like it. i don't like to do what i don't like. and in the past, the next phrase of that logism would have been: i don't do what i don't like. but i believe it is that very thought, that single attachment to short term comfort, that has, with lazy hands, placed my aging body under the surgeon's knife. my bones have been whittled on, and the resultant ache, deep and unreachable, was utterly avoidable. it was, on a deeply important level, an elective surgery. had i NOT been so utterly deconditioned, sid would not have yanked my arm from its socket so easily or with such far reaching effects.

i've wanted to do yoga for years. many years. i've wanted to do tai chi. i actually LIKE to lift weights. it is a gift i have the power to give, and yet, for reasons weak and transparent, i withhold it. i am an episode of oprah. i have misused the whole female talk show ethic (be good to youself) to my detriment. and it is a lack of self worth, not time, that denies me any attachment to the maintenance of my physical body. of many, many trite sayings, one that so often rings true is this: awareness without action is insanity. now i know a bit about insanity. a good bit. and as i lay in my sick bed in the middle of my wonderful life, i hope i can remember this moment... that as i heal and life normalizes once again, that my resolve does not dissolve -- that i make time to be better in the one way i refuse to face: the physical. bob earl said it best. "my mind thinks it can kill my body and go on." now granted, he was speaking about addiction, but this is an addiction: to ease, to laxity, to passivity, to pretending it doesn't really matter.

so, don't indulge me. don't tell me to put the bat down. don't tell me to take it easy. i have. i could, perhaps, be less dramatic, but what fun would that be?

enough. time will tell. for now, i heal. back to the couch.