old-boots

Well-being is realised by small steps but is truly no small thing
~ Zeno, quoted in Lives of the Stoics by Ryan Holiday & Stephen Hanselman

“life”

We have an amazing capacity to imagine a future state and plan and act towards it. When we gaze at the stars in the night sky, we become a paradox—how small and insignificant we are, but how far we can reach! The barrier between what is and what can be becomes paper-thin. The alert individual inhabits this in-between-world at the best of times. Any growth requires scratching at this outer limit of who we are now. Gains (or losses) can only be realised at the margins. This is our life (lowercase, with pronoun); it can be planned, organised, dictated and executed; measured. If we have any wish to evolve, we will be doing these things already.

But life isn’t always lowercase…

“LIFE”

As we strive for upward momentum in our lives—practising positivity, lifting weights, drinking lattes, and being polite—we occasionally notice that there is something else beyond our plans, barely perceptible. What is that gnawing feeling? To avoid cognitive dissonance, we have developed a coping mechanism: studied incredulity. It works, too. Most of the time, we are left to sow and reap, love and hate, and perfect our idiosyncrasies in obscurity. But sometimes, we barrel headlong into an invisible wall; take a plunge, but the pool’s been drained. Our life converges with LIFE.

LIFE doesn’t do pleasantries. It turns up unannounced. Its calling cards are euphoria or intense pain, or both. LIFE is uppercase and pronoun-less. LIFE is leverage, good or bad. It’s the culmination of history and an infinite stream of interconnectivity carrying us in its swell. This is the domain where mere success and failure, as measured in our life, don’t exist. It’s a world of flukes and accidents, luck and epiphanies, tragedy and hope.

Pain

LIFE paid me a visit in July. I was doing ok: being nice, exercising, balancing work with trips to the Freibad. Then I slipped a disc—a massive prolapse at the first vertebrae—and everything changed. In terms of blogging, I had been cranking out one or two articles a month and was happy with that. Then, nothing for more than six months.

The pain in my hips and right leg was excruciating and horribly unpredictable. I couldn’t extend my leg or bend forwards. I would wake up in the night and it felt like my leg had been detached at the hip and thrown into a sea of searing pain.

The world becomes a different place when you are suffering. You realise that one of the fundamental unspoken needs of existence is to be as free from pain as possible, and how that contradicts our need to grow and push the boundaries (“no pain, no gain,” they say). Wim Hof’s tagline is, “Happy, strong and healthy”; anything else is secondary. For better or for worse, the entire infrastructure of “normal” life is premised on these three things being true. It is taken for granted, as if it happens spontaneously, but this is a bitter fiction for many, many people, and suffering within this system is a major source of friction. I started a journey of phone calls, paperwork and appointments; orthopedic doctors, physiotherapists, radiologists and neurosurgeons. Everyone knows something…and after three months stoically getting on with life, I finally had a diagnosis. Until then, I was doing ok, slowly recovering strength and mobility. Being told I should basically be unable to control my lower body and its functions(!) was the least encouraging thing I had heard for years and it probably put my recovery back by weeks. But finally some reassurance that balanced out the fear and uncertainty.

Perspective

Coming around again to my opening statement, it’s good to push forwards, seeking progress. But after “entering a world of pain,” as Walter Sobchak would put it, that becomes pretty irrelevant. Openness to the world is replaced by an intense inward focus and a stuck-record like inner dialogue about symptoms. There’s no growth, only survival.

Aside: In the West, most of our basic needs are well met, so inner dialogue about meeting those needs is mostly soft background noise. Not, “Oh God, I’m desperately hungry,” but rather, “I’m going to eat that sandwich now.” Not, “it’s freezing and I have nowhere to go,” but rather, “bit chilly, better put on that sweater.” Not so with intense pain: “This hurts like hell, I don’t know what it is or when it will stop and I am very, very scared.”

The thing with perspective is, it’s only my perspective that has changed. Everyone else’s, along with their expectations, are still the same. There is a drifting apart of wills, filled with inertia. I am doing the same things, moving in the same direction, but lacking conviction or compassion. What I loved to do before becomes mere triviality or nonsense. Why bother? Because the alternative is much worse: giving up, withdrawing, depression…that’s an awful place to be. Nevertheless, the inner voice of suffering pulls one in that direction and has to be actively opposed.

So what did I do and how come I am writing again? I remembered two platitudes my dad was fond of—“just plodding on,” and “just putting one foot in front of the other”—and decided to take them literally. I walked and I walked and I walked. In the morning when the kids were at school or in the evening when the kids were asleep. To the shop, to the football pitch, to nowhere in particular. Walking in the evening is best. After a day of challenges, magic happens in the world of streetlights and shadows. The inner dialogue stops, the inner critic shuts up, no one else is around, just fresh air and the rhythm of my steps. It looked ridiculous in the beginning because I couldn’t walk properly (I tried to hide it) but I basically walked myself back to health. I attribute at least 80% of my recovery to simply walking. I highly recommend it. It’s an antidote to almost anything: stress, anger, shame, pride, ambition, drivenness, being useful or productive; whether you’re on your high horse or down in the gutter, walk it off.

From the intellect to the feet via the lungs

You can look up at the stars and cook up big plans but you’re going nowhere unless you breathe and take the next step. And sometimes, in the face of adversity, the next step and a chest full of oxygen is all that matters.