On Vulnerability

I have fallen as I climbed the stairs from the Paris Metro into a rainy, windswept day.  I have fallen in the middle of York Avenue in Toronto--fortunately early on a Sunday morning.  I have fallen turning 90 degrees to dry my hands on a dishtowel.  I have caught my toes on nothing in the Lawson Fieldhouse and starfished onto the rubber pavement that caught my lazy toe. Curbs are my nightmare, particularly in winter, when I think I know where the edge is, only to have my heel hit a little ski slope, and down I go.  Or going up curbs.  If I'm not concentrating, I don't lift my right foot up far enough and my knees hit the pavement. I fell, on average, every 36 days last year. 

In an attempt to understand why I was falling and why my right leg quite consistently froze up mid-stride, I have spent three hours in an MRI.  I have had ten vials of blood drawn and then gone back for two more.  I have had my body mildly electrocuted for a nerve-induction study that would measure how well or badly my nerves were sending signals to my brain or my brain was sending signals to my limbs.  All through this, I have felt this was my fault:  that last winter, after three bad falls on ice, I gave up walking outside when I didn't have to until I was safe, and I let the strength in my right leg deteriorate to the point where it spasmed in weakness every three or four steps. 

But it wasn't my fault.  I have "significant" nerve damage because I have a couple of bulging disks and some arthritis in my back that has pinched nerves in my spine.  My brain was only whispering to my feet and legs.  My feet and legs were sending soft, slow messages to my brain that I was on uncertain terrain.  I nearly cried when the neurologist told me that.  

Because I was an English professor, I've tried to learn from this experience. (I know that sounds like a non sequitur, but English professors--all readers and lovers of art, really, try to learn from everything that is human.)  Simone Weil was obsessed with, among other things, "affliction," those moments in people's lives when they are or feel they are thrust outside normality or outside the human family.  Affliction can be as simple as feeling utterly incompetent in your body because you can't navigate curbs safely or it can be as complex and debilitating as being homeless or being an addict. A character in the novel I'm revising is working on an honours paper on Weil and sees affliction in the  homeless encampment outside the Regina City Hall.  What she sees is people "Beyond suffering.  Degradation and social exclusion and abandonment." My character is young, and she has a better grasp of the enormity of it: it isn't about falling up curbs.  It prompts her to recall Weil's plangent question:  "What are you going through?" Here's my first lesson:  I found that I asked that question more often, sometimes silently, sometimes by opening a door or asking how someone was doing or just seeing someone and making eye contact and smiling, saying hi.

I learned that my body is a means, not an end.  When you are young, the experiences of your body are ends in themselves.  It's your body, after all, that delivers you the pleasure of sunshine on your skin or great sex or the high you feel after a wonderful run. Celebrate every one of those delights your body delivers.  Lyra has just now climbed into my lap, and the weight and fur of a loving cat comes to me courtesy of my body.  Sometimes I think that part of our general ennui right now is that our screens make us all eyes, and we aren't experiencing or valuing the delights of our skin, the sound of animated conversations in a coffee shop, or the smell of baking bread. 

Then your hearing starts to go or things don't taste quite as intense as they used to, or you keep falling during your runs. (Though I have to say that cataract surgery has returned to me the vision of a world that is almost psychedelic in its intensity:  I'm seeing colours and textures I haven't noticed for years, seeing them everywhere. Grocery shopping is a gas.) You need to make a shift, to see your body as a container of your experience, your humanity, your knowledge and wisdom, your love of life. It has to get you to that long sleep with as much delight and love and grace as you can muster.  It has become a means.  So you need to take care of it, be gentle with it, accommodate it. I have learned, I think, to stop beating my body up so much with questions about its incompetence, though I've had a beast of a cold for nearly three weeks and I still want to ask "Why?"  Why am I still so exhausted?

You've been subject to my many mantras, particularly the one about being curious.  Or "Be. Here.  Now."  But I've discovered a new one.  "Cope with what is.  Embrace it if you can." I'm asking why a little less often, or cutting the question off mid-sentence.  Exhaustion is what I've got this afternoon.  What am I going to do with it?  A longer nap among the cats? A Miss Fisher mystery, stopping to envision all the delicious clothing?  Certainly I will obsess a little less about my step count and maybe find a good complicated book that I can just stop and think about when the cats feel cuddly.