There's a triumph in hitting walls, you see.
As a child they always told me that running into walls was a sign of clumsiness, of inability to pay attention to where you're going.
I still hit that kind of wall.
Lately, though, I've been hitting them in a whole new way, and it hurts a lot more, especially the day after --
but only on the outside.
I hit a wall in yoga last night, The Infamous Yengar Method is turning out to be a world of militant difficult than Hatha or Ashtanga.
My flexibility is getting me nowhere. I can bend in two eleven different ways -- but there's no advantage in that, in fact, the disadvantage is that my over-flexibility doesn't force me to use the right muscle groups. So I use joints. And hurt myself. And over-extend and misunderstand how to engage the right muscles.
So it's a long climb.
With inspirations and illuminations every few metres.
It was a long climb to my first headstand. It'll be a longer climb still to my first handstand, and whilst I can drop into a bridge from standing, I can't even get my shoulders off the ground in the upside-down-push-up Yengar method.
Last night I got a menstrual cramp just as I'd shakily gotten one shoulder off the floor.
After an hour spent upside down, with my blood in my head, and my blood pressure higher than it's ever been for the last two weeks, that cramp knocked me out, and straight onto the wee crown of my head.
I spent the next half hour in a modified mutter-mutter-asana position, with ever-determined teach yelling at me every time I tried to get up.
"But I feel much better..."
"I'll tell you when you're better".
I seem to be collecting moms for all the time I lost before.
And I appreciate it.
I stumbled home in a daze after that, and there was much steaming of dumplings and canning of tomatoes, and through cracked eyes I watched as Dave sprang about the kitchen, sterilizing jars, peeling tomatoes, grinning and giggling and filling the house with such a bubbling joy that despite my namesake I realized that I'd never seen a house so filled before.
This morning I whirled through a meeting with my ears sharp as knives, words falling at the right paces and places, the conversation taking the right (and left) turns and eddying to fill all the empty pools with not a flood in sight. We broke fifteen minutes early will all the conclusions in neat little rows.
I am learning to speak.
At high noon Connie edged my enthusiasm towards the gym, and I paid careful attention to every lesson I learned about my muscle groups in yoga and survived the eight minutes on the Machine Of Cardio Death that pushed my heart rate up so hard last time that I puked.
Then we played with the rowing machines, then Alex The Gay Mehican Chihuaha Trainer showed me eight, EIGHT different excercises for my piddling forearms, then we Got Back On The Machine Of Puking Death. For ten minutes. And my heart rate went way too high and I knew it and I felt the room spin but I was almost done and I listened to my body and I pulled with this muscle instead of that one and made it to the stretching room dizzy, lightheaded -- but thrilled I'd made it so far.
I've been working so hard on this, only to watch my weight freeze, my pant size shift a little in the thighs but not move anywhere. I've watched my blood pressure drop out of the danger zone and then climb so high that it's Find A New Doctor time.
My resting heart-rate is still thirty beats per minute too high.
Thirty. It's half again what it should be, so hopelessly higher than my efforts belie.
But I'm working. There's a pride there in itself. Connie and Dave and this or that friendly face look at me sometimes and say that the difference is there, and some mornings I feel it in the lengthening of my stride. I'm so far behind everyone else that some mornings I'm ashamed, but you know -- other mornings I'm smart enough to know better.
But it's a long climb from every angle. Just so you know, ED fucks up your heart forever.
And in other news, there's a singing lesson tonight, and Heather's taking maternity leave in November (I'm invited to her baby shower! Do I have to have one? How do these things work?) and is suggesting that I try her trainer at the conservatory for a few months while she's gone. For the rounding experience -- just for the experience really. We'll see if I have the courage to even call.
Then there's dinner for a lovely lady's birthday.
Then there's this' and thats' and somewhere in there there's time for learning, and love, and growth and frustrations and even occasional rest.
Final tally?
I've put in more than enough effort, and achieved way too many results to not be inordinately proud.
I just have to learn to remember that in the face of some of the steeper climbs.
And until I do, I am fortunate enough to know this strange, rakish, man, who, among so many wonderful others -- will always remind me.