Okay…so now to put on shoes. Gingerly, she dried her toes, being careful not to let the towel flop into the sopping puddle beneath the bench. Though she instinctively tilted to the other direction, it was important to remember to put her right sock and shoe on first, so that the broader, flatter foot could then support the weight of her left leg lifted over her right knee to put on her left sock and shoe. Done the other way, her left foot bent uncomfortably outwards, trying to support the weight of her right leg as she lifted it over her opposing knee. That caused warping and damage of all the wrong sorts, so it was important to remember the right order of things.
Collecting her towel, costume, shampoo bottle and comb, she was grateful that she travelled light. Given her body’s lopsided lurch, could she pass through that gap? Would the floor be slippery? Was she risking a drop into the pool? Only one way to find out – “Excuse me!” All right this time.
Passing through the swing doors, she balanced carefully so that the door weight would help rather than hinder, and carefully negotiated the stairs down. It looked easy enough, because she had been coming to this pool for almost forty years, but, put her at another poolside, and the vista became more frightening, less certain. She had patterns, places she went and could visit, because they were familiar. Remove that relaxing element of knowing what came next, and she floundered. It all became a bit predictable after a while though. She did long to go somewhere different.
People are not symmetrical, naturally, and there is no harm in that. Mostly, our hips and backs are able to compensate for minor differences, such as one leg slightly longer than its neighbour, or a slightly off-kilter spine. But put the whole mishmash together, and some days, she just wanted to dissolve into the water, so fed up was she with her short-sighted, just about can’t quite get it life. This morning at the pool, for instance, putting on her top and jacket, she leaned against the wall of the cubicle and tears just sprang up and kept coming. She was grateful for poolside noises echoing, which disguised her gulping sniffs. The yearning for release was so intense that she could hardly see her way to leave, to walk down the steps and out the door. But no-one commented as she reached the car, sank into her seat and wept shamefacedly, until she forced herself to stop. Got to go. Lopsided or no, must get on.
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May 20, 2014
Difficulties (2)
Fran Macilvey acceptance, change, choices, learning, letting go, patience, release Fran's School of Hard Knocks 4 Comments
Sending off all my pet hates, sealing up my worries, discarding my concerns takes great discipline. You would think I could just get on and do it – hop out of the cage and be done with all this negativity stuff, but it doesn’t seem to work like that.
Bad news and habitual difficulties have a habit of clinging on, a bit like the smell of mouldy old clothes – and there is a prize there for anyone who can spot the pun. Actually, this is one of my favourites, sent to me in a dream many years ago. I need to get rid of my bad habits, my old hang-ups. It would be good if I could just discard them for ever. Or box and send them off to the sorting office in the sky. Slap on a stamp and send them away, so that they cannot contaminate, and maybe so that someone else might fix them.
Old messages are part of an old record, with deep grooves, so it takes a while to notice how deeply buried are the old, tired repeats: “I can’t manage…I have to do everything alone….” Out-of-date litanies these may be, but still, they spool round, and on bad days, in tense times, can spill out and threaten to soil the new growth.
Maybe that thought of ‘trying to quit’ doesn’t work so well, because the universe prefers positive formulae. How about, “I am consistently fortunate. Good fortune is all around me, all the time.” I find myself warming more easily to positive words. I find them easier to wrap around me like a cosy blanket. It feels more welcome to embrace the good news than shun the bad: when we try to shun the bad, we have to remember what the bad is, which defeats the purpose of trying to shun it. I think I will stick with the positive stuff. Much easier to work with, and eventually, the hope is that the good news will smooth over the old stuff and allow the positive to flow more easily.
‘Living mindfully’ is a phrase I used to hear a lot. I think it means, remembering not to slip, to go back to the old, deep tracks that are so easy to tumble into. Patterns of defeatism, failure and self-hatred are seductive often because they have been our companions for such a long time and their voices are familiar: which is why discipline is so useful. The refusal to go back there, to slip away un-noticed into the strange comforts of familiar brutalities must be a conscious decision. That conscious choice takes determination and a lot of patience. But the first step, as always, is to decide.
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