Now What?

Personal musings on the challenges of being hyperactive while having restricted movement.

Solvitur ambulando. I have this motto on my fridge and it translates to ‘it is solved by walking.’ For me, this is often the case. If I am stressed, it will help if I go take a walk in the woods. If I’m not getting enough sleep, walking more will help, especially if I do it in the morning to help get my circadian rhythm back on track. If my hyperactive mind starts spinning around in circles, walking will get me out of my head and into my body and I will get calmer.

So imagine my distress when I get injured and I am unable to walk for long stretches of time. Of course, ‘long stretches of time’ is a relative term, but for me that usually means about a week if I get one of my EDS flare-ups. (If you’re not familiar with EDS, it’s a genetic disorder where basically your connective tissue has issues and you are much more prone to injury than other people. Your body is all loosey-goosey and it just doesn’t stay together the way it should.)

This past summer I experienced a flare-up that lasted well over a month—by far the longest one I have ever had. I was eventually able to get into PT and very slowly start making some headway, but it was a painstakingly slow process.
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So what to do with myself? That was something I had to ask myself every day. Having an injured hip did not slow down my hyperactive mind at all, and it was liking having a mind that was totally at odds with the body it found itself in. This can’t be right! There must be some mistake! I just need to figure out what little thing I need to do to turn this off and get back to my regularly scheduled life….right?

So initially I did all the things I already knew how to do—I mediated, I did tai chi barefoot in the backyard, I tried to take naps to make up for the loss of sleep in the night from the pain. I was thankful for all the herbs I had that took the edge off of not just the pain but my mood and the occasional panic that could creep in (I’m pretty claustrophobic as well and not being able to walk more than a few steps at a time without a lot of trouble could be pretty triggering). I eliminated a few foods that I thought could potentially be driving up inflammation and making it worse.

Those things were all helpful, but the situation remained challenging. None of those things could totally ‘fix’ the reality that I was injured and that it was going to take some time to recover. There was an acceptance piece I had to come to terms with. And an acknowledgement that I can’t control everything, even if I do all the ‘right’ things. We can’t just get rid of all the suffering there is in life, and it’s unreasonable to expect that we can. Deep breath, deep breath, deep breath…

One day a few weeks into the whole thing I realized I was kind of sick of doing tai-chi in the backyard. I mean, it’s great, but I only know  a handful of movements and then I would throw in the handful of Qi Gong I know as well and that’s only going to go so far. I remembered some of the restorative yoga a teacher had worked with me on a handful of years back and attempted some of that as well.

There was this one exercise in particular that we called ‘The Balance Beam.’ You walk very slowly, putting one foot in front of the other as though you are walking on a beam. Once you have one foot in front of the other foot, you take a moment to balance your weight as evenly as possible between the two feet. Once you feel that equillibrium, then you bring the other foot in front and get your weight balanced again, and so on.

Doing this barefoot in the backyard, where the terrain is slightly uneven with every step, actually takes a lot of concentration. Your feet are getting all sorts of sensory input from the grass and all those tiny little muscles in the feet are getting the chance to support you in a way that they never can when they are confined to our every day shoes (unless you have transitioned to wearing barefoot shoes, as I am doing).

After a few minutes, I realized that I had entered a sort of flow state and that it was actually very pleasant to walk through my backyard at this pace (and was not painful). It was like the ‘stop and smell the roses pace’ that I can’t normally find the patience to do. Just walking slow makes me impatient, but this exercise was so engaging that it completely absorbed me and transported me to this zone I normally can’t access.

It was a real breakthrough! I spent a few days weaving my way through the backyard at this pace, really taking in everything that was growing and changing and connecting with the yard in a new way.

While all of that was going on, I was also attempting to go on my usual walks every morning. It usually takes a few minutes before the pain hits, so I would get my shoes on and head outside and just hope that this was the day it would finally be able to happen. But every day I wouldn’t even make it out of the driveway before the stabbing in my hip would start. And then I would turn around and go back inside.

One day I had just turned back around to go back inside when it finally occurred to me to try walking at a slower pace. Seriously, it took me weeks to get there. When the injury first happened there was not a pace that would have been slow enough to be ok—I really did need to stay in bed initially. But after the worst of it was over, I was just so deeply ingrained to walk at a certain pace that it was all or nothing for me—either I can walk, or I can’t. End of story.

So that balance beam exercise I had been doing in the backyard helped me build a bridge. I took some more steps toward the trail in the balance beam style, and then started adapting my pace to go much more slowly than usual. If any discomfort started up, I would slow down even further. And just like that I was able to walk again. And yes, my 82 year old neighbor who walks every day goes a lot faster than I was going then, but just being able to be out in the trees walking after all that time was amazing!

The whole thing reminded me of something I see with my piano students all the time (I still teach a handful of lessons to kids after school!). Especially if they already know the song they are learning, they just want to play it at full speed and often seem incapable of slowing down, no matter how many times you tell them you can’t learn a piece at that speed. The speed at which you play it in the end is not the speed you start out with. You have to start slow.

If a student is unable to learn that lesson, they are highly unlikely to get to an advanced level, and often won’t even get to an intermediate level. In a society that is always running at full speed, it is a true superpower to learn how to operate at different speeds, especially speeds that are slower. Those are the speeds where learning can happen, and healing, and growth.

This was not the lesson I expected to learn over the summer, and I probably wouldn’t have opted for it if I had the chance, but I can say that learning to slow down was something I needed more work in. Maybe eventually I’ll get to a point where I don’t have to get injured before I am receptive to the art of slowing down, but for right now, I’ve got to accept where I’m at and allow the experience to change me moving forward. Solvitor ambulando, perhaps, but pace matters too. Going at the right pace can be everything.
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