The Journey Forward

It's been a couple of weeks since I decided to get back to the core training that I'd been doing, quite faithfully, for the past 4 years. I'd finally given it up when the recent knee injury came in on top of the shoulder problem that I'd been trying to work my way through for almost a year. After that, it took about 4 weeks to rest the injuries, get used to the discomfort, and finally get some treatment before I concluded that I needed to do SOMETHING rather than give up on EVERYTHING.

Looking back, I realize that this has been a necessary strategy throughout the various cycles of injury and aging that I've experienced over the past 15 years. True enough, there's a necessary element of retreat implicit in all of it. But it's a strategic and rational retreat, away from the things which, with age, no longer serve to maintain the basic strength and balance and flexibilty of our bodies but actually expose them to further, and oftentimes accelerated, deterioration and damage.

It's been a hard lesson, especially for one who has spent most of a lifetime trying to maintain some semblence of personal fitness through all of the changes in body, mind, and opportunity which are, quite simply, the inevitable consequences of living. At the core of that lesson is the realization that life itself is seldom an all-or-nothing proposition. And that these "strategic retreats" should not be taken as, or be turned into, a sort of unconditional surrender in the face of an advancing enemy.

To do so is to become one's own worst enemy and simply accelerates a process which is, in reality, both natural and inevitable. Better, I think, to understand it as part of the journey forward rather than as a falling back.

There is, after all, real courage and the possibility of continued growth in that...

LPK
LiveJournal
3.8.2016