The body has opinions now.
This is new. Or rather: this is new in the sense that it is louder now. The body has always had opinions, I know that, the body was always registering things, the tension in the shoulders and the jaw and the held breath of a woman who learned early that her body was a tool for other people’s use and a tool does not have opinions. But now the opinions are harder to override. The knee says: not yet. The back says: not like that. The whole body says, on certain mornings: slower.
I am practising listening.
This is harder than it sounds for a person who spent decades treating the body’s complaints as obstacles to be managed. Who took the ibuprofen and did the thing anyway. Who pushed through because the thing needed doing and the body was not the point, the body was infrastructure, the body was the vessel that got you to where the real work was happening.
The body was always the real work happening. That is what I know now.
I walk to the water in the morning and I walk slowly. Not because I cannot walk faster but because I am trying to be in the walk rather than beyond it. I am trying to feel the ground under my feet as information rather than resistance. I am trying to arrive at the water instead of simply appearing there. The arriving matters. I spent so long appearing places without arriving that I am having to learn the difference from scratch.
A slower body knows things a faster one misses.
The particular light at seven in the morning that is different from the light at eight. The sound the gravel makes underfoot when you are moving slowly enough to hear it. The way the cold gets into your hands if you do not put them in your pockets and how the cold in your hands is just cold, not a problem, just the temperature of the world registering on your body, which is alive, which is still here, which is slower and more particular and more present than it has ever been.
I am learning to live in this body rather than managing it.
I am learning the difference.
