Weakness Isn’t Failure

Check out my new accessory: crutches.

Related: my world keeps shrinking.

First it was shelter-in-place. All the places I could go before the pandemic whittled away to home plus walkability. And my ongoing joy before and during SIP has been walking around our beautiful small town. Time with my husband, with my dogs, with myself, sweating through thoughts and feelings until I could just be in the moment, enjoying the sunshine, the flowers, the birds and blue sky.

Even at home, I had no idea how much pleasure I took from relocating every so often: from the bedroom recliner to the living room lounger to the front porch Adirondack or the back deck bistro table, the simple act of changing my seat helped me to reset and refocus.

Yesterday I spent the entire day in the recliner and I realized how I missed the views from those different chairs as my day-long view narrowed to my bedroom.

I injured myself walking too hard, too fast, too far, too often. And even when I knew I was injured, when I began limping, I didn’t stop. I discontinued my daily walks, but I stayed upright and in motion: cooking, lugging full baskets of laundry, etc. Instead of getting better, I got worse until yesterday when I discovered that I could barely hobble and that attempting to hobble had become excruciating.

I should have stopped. I should have limited myself to stretching, icing, resting. I have regularly considered myself a champ at rest–oh, how I love a good nap!–so why did I find it so hard to give my injury the restful time it needed to heal?

Injury can be hard to admit. Injury = weakness. It feels like failure.

Maybe it would be different if I had done something spectacular, if I had slid off a mountainside or launched headlong over bike handles. Maybe if I had been training for a marathon. But that’s never been my style. Nope, my style is to do something common, uncommonly bad. My big-time fail involved insufficient stretching for walking around my neighborhood. That sounds so lame, yet here I am, temporarily lame.

On top of the pain I feel needy and frustrated; I have definitely shed some tears. But like the attitude shift necessary to adapt to the limited world of this pandemic pause, I have decided to look for the gift in the challenge.

The gift? Time! Not walking means I have more time in each day. Of course, I’d prefer not to be injured and to be pounding the pavement, but since I can’t be on my feet, I can write from any seat in the house.

Yesterday I opened a writing file I haven’t seen since before the 2019 holidays. I could have had a crappy first draft before 2020 began, but I put it away and let the tides of life carry me.

It feels good to be back at it, to have a project that depends on me to give it life. That maybe, someday, it will become something bigger than me and offer encouragement, hope, love to others. That’s the dream.

We all face challenges of one sort or another, physical, mental, emotional, spiritual. Sometimes the challenge is yours to journey alone. Or maybe you have a difficult work situation, or a significant relational issue. It’s tough to stop, to admit the injury and give it the time and attention it requires to heal. We don’t like to fail. But truly, weakness isn’t the failure. Not heeding the warning of pain, not attending to the weakness, not dealing with it swiftly and appropriately, that’s the failure.

How about you? What challenges are you facing, and what can you do to discover the gift inside?