Noticing

When the massage therapist and I were doing the pre-pummeling inventory yesterday, I was commenting on bodily things that had happened in the past week that I thought were strange. An eight-pound water-retention gain, for instance. The fact that I suddenly have a very, very low tolerance for meat. (More on that later.) The fact that I’m sleeping wonderfully in spite of quite a lot of work stress. [No, there’s not the remotest chance I’m pregnant, so don’t ask about that.]

Then, once I was on the table, it occurred to me that perhaps none of these things is really strange in itself. It’s the fact that I bothered to notice them that is strange. There’s a phrase in academia, “brain on a stick.” It refers to the scholar’s tendency to ignore their body in favor of nurturing their brain, and it explains all the poor health and bizarre haberdashery and coiffure that goes on. In the past, I’ve been very bad about that. I make a point of wearing clean, appropriate clothes, keeping my hair cut and dyed, and keeping up with hygeine, but I have a tendency to ignore the way my body feels. I can ignore pain (especially the kind that comes from inactivity), thirst, sleepiness, whatever, when I’m working through a semester.

I was jolted out of that mindset last winter when I broke my ankle. All of a sudden, I was forced to be very in tune with my body and how it felt and what it needed. When I was recovering, I promised myself that I would maintain that awareness, that it would be one of the good things to come out of that accident. And I have, although it’s been a very gradual process over the past year in order to make it a daily habit. But now I know when something hurts or I need to drink more water, and I almost always do something about it. That’s a huge difference.