Learning to Walk - Understanding Pain

Learning to Walk
If you take walking for granted or have never lived with chronic pain, I highly recommend reading The Man Who Learned to Walk Three Times by Peter Kavanagh to gain insight and compassion. If you struggle with mobility problems and/or pain, read this book and you'll know you're not alone. And if you’re a CBC Radio fan, you can find out more about the author who was a long-time CBC Radio employee.

Understanding Pain
I’ve had two hip replacements and back surgery in less than two years. The biggest problem isn’t the physical pain – it’s my emotional response: fear and anxiety, a sense of worthlessness, and social isolation.

Kavanagh explains it well in his book:

“The dirty little secret of every encounter with a health problem or the medical system is that no one likes to talk about the social and psychological aspects of being ill, experiencing pain, limping or simply struggling to walk. One thing Buddhists know and attempt to deal with is how much the characterization of the self gets caught up in and twisted throughout with each and every aspect of our day-to-day lives. We can use any aspect of life to somehow convince ourselves how special we are. My pain, my limp, come to define me, and I can use them to beat up on myself, to distinguish myself from you and others, or even as the reason why I can’t be happy.”

“As the Buddha once wrote:

when touched with a feeling of pain,
the ordinary uninstructed person
sorrows, grieves,
and laments, beats his breast,
becomes distraught.
So he feels two pains,
physical and mental.

Just as if they were to shoot a man with an arrow and,
right afterward,
were to shoot him with another one,
so that he would feel the pain of two arrows.

“Or, in a less poetic sense, mindfulness guru Jon Kabat-Zinn writes: ‘Physical pain is the response of the body and the nervous system to a huge range of stimuli that are perceived as noxious, damaging, or dangerous. There are really three dimensions to pain: the physical, or sensory component; the emotional, or affective component – how we feel about the sensation; and the cognitive component – the meaning we attribute to our pain.’ ”

See also: Bibliotherapy for Legs that Don’t Move the Way They Should

Bibliotherapy for Legs that Don’t Move the Way They Should

I started using a cane in December 2013 and six months later I was using a walker. Walking, even across the living room, was painful and to be avoided if at all possible. My world shrank to include only locations with parking outside the door. I no longer shopped at a supermarket – the distances were just too great.

I had a hip replacement in September 2013. It felt like a miracle. I could put weight on two legs. No more standing on tiptoe! But three months later I had back surgery. Recovery, this time, was slow and painful. I felt isolated and very much alone. I wanted desperately to walk again so I spent one and a half hours a day doing exercises, swimming, walking, and eventually climbing stairs.

I've never put much faith in bibliotherapy, but I found companionship and inspiration reading about Franklin Roosevelt (The Man He Became: How FDR Defied Polio to Win the Presidency by James Tobin) who looked like a shoo-in to be president until he developed polio. But he persevered, exercising and swimming, and he did become president, in spite, or perhaps because of, the braces and wheelchair.

Gail Caldwell (New Life, No Instructions) had polio before she learned to walk so when her leg was in pain and movement was difficult she – and her doctors – blamed it on post-polio syndrome. It was years before someone x-rayed her hip and realized she needed a hip replacement. I could really empathize with her struggles to get her muscles working again and I deeply admired her perseverance. And she loved swimming too because the water provided freedom of movement.

We take walking for granted. And yet, it is a complex symphony of muscles and tendons and joints, moving in harmony, propelling us forward. Walking is a miracle – whether it's across a parking lot or beside a river. I am profoundly grateful to be walking again.

Walking

"How can you explain that you need to know that the trees are still there, and the hills and the sky? Anyone knows they are. How can you say it is time your pulse responded to another rhythm, the rhythm of the day and the season instead of the hour and the minute? No, you cannot explain. So you walk."

Author unknown, from New York Times editorial, The Walk, 25 October 1967

Don't Settle for Mediocrity

“Cows, after you've seen them for a while, are boring. They may be well-bred cows, Six Sigma cows, cows lit by a beautiful light, but they are still boring. A Purple Cow, though: Now, that would really stand out. The essence of the Purple Cow – the reason it would shine among a crowd of perfectly competent, even undeniably excellent cows – is that it would be remarkable. Something remarkable is worth talking about, worth paying attention to. Boring stuff quickly becomes invisible. The world is full of boring stuff – brown cows – which is why so few people pay attention. Remarkable marketing is the art of building things worth noticing right into your product or service.”

Excerpt from The Purple Cow in Fast Company 

Smiley face screws by Yuma Kano (via Colossal)

 

Japan's artistic manhole covers (via Colossal)

 

 Security Fence by Mathais Megyeri (via Safe Growth)

I am Traveller

"I am traveller. I have a destination but no maps. Others perhaps have reached that destination already, still others are on their way. But none has had to go from here before - nor will again. One's route is one's own. One's journey unique. What I will find at the end I can barely guess. What lies on the way is unknown."

P.K. Page

"Traveller, Conjuror, Journeyman"

1970

Not Having What We Want, But Wanting What We Have

“Gnarled sweet potatoes, tips curling like the feet of witches. Hubbard squashes, big enough to sit on, warty, blue. Mushrooms flaring their gills. Back in July, the tomatoes and corn the farmers offered were cheery, Crayola-bright. October is scary: it holds every child’s most despised vegetable in its wrinkled claw. . . .

“The vegetables of summer are easy to love, as it is easy to find young men and women beautiful, to promise commitment before it has been tested, to be happy beneath a cloudless sky. I’m still not sure it’s natural to prefer what’s difficult and unwieldy, to feel affection warts-and-all. But the world is older and slower and more patient than we ever will be.

"These vegetables keep, and have helped every generation before ours survive long winters. They are part of the great practice of not having what we want, but wanting what we have, and after years of trying – of trying and trying – my husband and I have both come to love, even crave, beets and butternut squash, the hard vegetables of fall. We appreciate their complexity. We find them very good.”

(Katrina Vandenberg, Orion magazine)

Doors: An Exploration in Words and Photographs

Open doors. Closed doors. Doors to the future. Doors to the past. An exploration in words and photographs.