Learning To Stretch & Break Free Of The Cobwebs That Bind Us.
Every now and then, I simply want to chuck all this surrendering business I’ve been exploring…
I look up at the sky, scowl, and raise a manicured fist. “What’s your problem?” I grouse. “Would you please go pick on someone else for a change?”
But Joe Ellis was relentless in fifth grade, and so, too, these days, is God.
Apparently a divorce, a move to a new city, and a diagnosis of cancer for my Dear Friend is not enough…
And, yes, I know I sound like I’m whining because I am. But even Job — the patience of Job Job — had his moments.
I cry out to You for help, but You do not answer me; I stand up, and You turn Your attention against me. You have become cruel to me; With the might of Your hand You persecute me.
I get it, Job. Oh, how I get it — because, now, on top of everything else, I’ve come down with a lovely little malady called adhesive capsulitis (frozen shoulder).
Which means that, lately, only dogs yelp more than I do. Climbing out of bed, reaching upward and behind to twist my hair into a ponytail, swatting at a mosquito (this is Dallas!), applying deodorant — simple little necessary acts, all of them. And all hurt.
I have long called bras instruments of torture. This now has whole new layers of meaning for me.
This left shoulder business is not new. For a couple of months, if not longer, I have fussed about it. But I tended to view the pain simply as a sign that I was shouldering too much. Or, since it was my left shoulder — my feminine side — as proof positive that I needed to follow the advice of Daily Om, assert more masculinity, and speak up on (my) behalf…
This is fun stuff to read, even galvanizing at places like auto repair shops. But it is a lousy game plan when your scapula, humerus, clavicle, and synovial fluid are on the offensive.
As quarterback Fran Tarkenton remarked, “Ignoring facts does not make them go away.”
Eventually I too caught on. I found an orthopedist… and, long story short, wound up with a happy hit of cortisone and a physical therapist named Evan, who bore not the gladdest of tidings.
Frozen shoulders do not behave like ice cubes on a sidewalk on a hot summer day.
Nor will thawing happen on its own… which is where Coach Evan comes in. I must stretch my shoulder daily, twice a day. And I cannot skip practice. Goof off… and, well, let’s just say the penalty will be one hell of an unpretty personal foul.
“Football is like life,” said Vince Lombardi, who led the Green Bay Packers to five National Football League championships in seven years, “it requires perseverance, self-denial, hard work, sacrifice, dedication and respect for authority.”
So, damn.
Dutifully, diligently I will inch my fingers up the wall as I zap my morning coffee or take an evening shower. Remember, remember, remember, I advise myself as I stretch and strain and sweat. You do not want to ask for help zipping up dresses for the rest of your life.
Coach Evan, however, is less than concerned with the back of my dresses than my back, period.
“Your posture sucks,” he announced at our first meeting.
“I know,” I sighed. I have heard this for years.
And what is worse, I know better. I know how to stand properly. I took ballet.
Why, then, haven’t I straightened up?
Laziness, perhaps. In many ways, it is far easier to remain a turtle than to train myself to become a giraffe. And while Gandhi is right — “the future depends on what we do in the present” — I am often more inclined to take a cue from the number 8. I’ll lie down for a nap… and delay things for eternity.
8
Fear of loss may play a role as well — loss of the known and comfortable. Slouching, for me, is like living life braless. It feels better. Yet it sure as hell doesn’t do my boobs any good, does it?
Standing correctly, on the other hand, requires that I lift my spine, set back my shoulders, tuck in my tummy, hold my head erect, whistle a happy tune and become aware — awareness being the most difficult part of all.
Except now my stupid shoulder has got my attention too. Did I mention that it hurts?
“Change happens,” says life coach Tony Robbins, “when the pain of staying the same is greater than the pain of change.”
Often it is easier to see the need for change in someone else. I think of my mother, the Queen of bitterness and negativity, or of pals mired in mindsets of quicksand. Yet before I can congratulate myself that I am not they, I remind myself that, actually, I am. We are all in the same coloring book; we’re simply colored in differently.
No man is an island, wrote poet John Donne. And no man is immune to a bad habit or two or, in my case, two thousand. Welcome to the freak show, folks.
So change I will. However, when I mess up and slump, when my ears are aligned with the Stop light blocks ahead rather than poised regally high a la a ballerina or a swan, I will not become discouraged. Swans got started being swans 126,000 years ago and the average ballerina studies at least 10 years.
Habits are at first cobwebs, then cables, says a Spanish proverb.
And, think about it, cobwebs are kind of cool. For starters, they do way more than remind us that we need to dust. Webs are a spider’s home and they trap dinner… but did you know that webs also act as bridges? (Remember Spider-Man and his webs?) Even real spiders can’t crawl everywhere.
What can I learn from this?
Where do I need to build a web of bridges?
Where am I called to be strong? As Wikipedia informed me, “the tensile strength of spider silk is greater than the same weight of steel.”
Conversely, cobwebs are sticky. Where am I stuck?
Or, to phrase these questions in terms Coach Evan would appreciate, How do I need to stretch?
I have no answers, but I am working on them. And, although it would be manna from the Great Shrink in the Sky if these questions turned as instantly into answers as pumpkins into coaches in fairy tales, guess what?
It took Job 37 chapters or so to catch on to what was really going on… it will take time for my shoulder to unfreeze… and it may well take what feels like ice ages for the claws of the abominable snowman abiding in my brain to melt the fuck out of Dodge.
I’m too untalented to achieve this. I’m too old to take this on. Who am I kidding, thinking I can do this? I’m a fool. I’ll look ridiculous. I’m scared…
Marissa Ann Mayer, CEO of Yahoo, gives me courage. “I always did something I was a little not ready to do,” she confides, “I think that’s how you grow. When you push through those moments, that’s when you have a breakthrough.”
It works exactly like this in PT, too. The first set of exercises hurts… but somehow the second hurts less… then, ditto the third.
In some ways, this holds true for growing-moments as well. I thought that my first stretching set — my divorce — was rough, and it was and is. I still get sad. But then came Set 2, the move to Dallas from LA. And, yes, homesickness and friendlessness are hell. But they’re not nearly the inferno of loss that divorce is.
Then Set 3, my Dear Friend’s cancer, struck…
Cancer is most definitely not painless. But, with hindsight, it becomes so clear how Sets 1 and 2 prepared me to accept not only the difficulty of Set 3, but strengthened me as well. They supplied me with the flexibility to cope.
Perhaps the stretching never ends. Perhaps Spider-Man is too limiting a mentor. Perhaps we are meant to be Stretch Armstrong.
As TIME magazine wrote when it nominated Stretch for its top slot in Toys of the 1970s: “Bending, pulling, twisting — nothing could bust him… (his) limbs could be pulled out to four times their natural span and still manage to squeeze back to normal size without the smallest stretch mark.”
I am so going to troll Amazon for a Stretch Armstrong of my own.
With Stretch as my hero of action, I will act. I will dream, I will strive, I will stretch… until, like Jack’s beanstalk, I make it all the way to the sky, where I will allow no one but no one to chop me down.
Just let them try.
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