Being Somewhere

2 May 2023

One of those legs belongs to my friend Helen Tyrrell. The other is mine. Helen’s’s having a hip replacement today. She posted a blog a few days ago provoked/inspired by the bodily suffering that has required today’s operation:

Helen asked herself how we can extract something positive from an experience we’d rather not have had- not by denying the negative but by not simply getting stuck in that and looking at what one might learn about one’s life. I’ll leave it at that. Helen tells it better and tells her own story. Here’s mine.

Doom and despair

In august 2016 I was felled by a slipped disc. Ironically it came to a head during a weekend doing walks in various locations with various friends, as a practical element of my masters dissertation in which walking played a major part. The next day I couldn’t get out of bed, couldn’t raise my left leg  and it was weeks before I could even walk to the end of the street (50 meters). It seemed doubtful I’d ever be able to go for walks in the country again or any of the other things that were central to my dissertation. Well central to my life really.

Another way of seeing

After a while I was able to manage a few hundred meters (and back) – very slowly. The same route every day. And things started to change. 

I passed the same things very slowly each day and more and noticed more of what I passed – plants growing obstinately between paving stones, little “gardens” on the street in front of someone’s house, places where birds were more likely to be seen or heard, purely human forms of decoration and of course things one would rather not have seen. I saw those things develop, bloom, decay. 

Where I turned round each day was a bridge over a canal. I usually took a rest there and mostly just stared into the water. It was different every day – the movement of the water, what was or was not reflected in it, the effect that and the weather had on me.

My little world began to take form and more obviously include more than just us and our bricks and mortar. As I grew fitter, that world expanded but I never lost that new awareness and the pleasure of slowly moving through whatever part of the world I was visiting that day. 

That was the beginning. Since then my practice of being in the world has continued to develop. My world has also expanded inwards too, with a greater awareness of my own body and readiness to let it do what it finds best and to refuse what it doesn’t. I’ve written about this elsewhere and probably will again, so here I only want to add what’s relevant to Helen’s theme 

A gift, a curse, something else?

I’m not going to pretend the slipped disk was some kind of blessing in disguise. I still live with the effects to a certain extent.  The left foot gets tired faster than I’d like and, if I don’t do the right exercises every day, that’s pretty fast. I’d be much happier if it had never happened. I’d have preferred to get my insights in a less painful way. I’m also still angry with myself that I didn’t rein myself in, when I had the feeling something might be wrong.

So what’s positive? It would be a bit trite to say “look – the slipped disc triggered something that’s changed my life for the better”. I see it rather that I somehow recognized/understood the connection between what I knew in principle (thanks to my tutors and fellow students) and what my physical limitations were imposing on me. I was able to find a new way of being that brought me closer to where I wanted and needed to be despite, not because of those limitations.

And that’s all I wanted to say.