It has opinions about stairs now.
Not all stairs. Not dramatically. Just a certain kind of morning, a certain quality of cold, the first flight of stairs before everything has warmed up and found its range of motion, the body registering the descent with a commentary that was not there a decade ago and is very much there now, audible, expressing itself in the language of small sounds I find mildly embarrassing and have mostly stopped trying to suppress because suppressing them takes energy I have decided to spend elsewhere.
I am learning to be interested rather than alarmed.
This is the practice. When the body offers information, new information, information in a register it has not used before, to receive it as information rather than as diagnosis. To say: noted. To say: let’s see what this needs. To say it to the body without the charge of dread, which used to accompany every new sensation, every unfamiliar protest, the immediate translation of body-speaks into what-if-this-is-the-beginning-of-the-thing-that-ends-me.
The body is not trying to scare me. The body is trying to tell me things.
It tells me when it needs water. It tells me when the walk was too long and the rest should be proportional. It tells me, with considerable clarity and no apology, that the things that used to be fine to eat at midnight are no longer fine and I should plan my evenings accordingly. It is not unkind about any of this. It is just honest in the way that long-term relationships become honest, no longer interested in the performance of being easy, willing now to say what it actually needs.
I spent decades not listening to this body.
I spent decades treating it as the container for my brain, the transport system for my productivity, the inconvenient biological situation I had to manage around the things I was actually trying to do. It has been patient with me about that. More patient than I deserved. And now it is asking for its turn, asking to be attended to in the way I attended to everything else, with full presence and adequate care and the willingness to take it seriously as a thing that matters.
I am listening now. Slowly, imperfectly, but actually listening.
It turns out the body has been saying interesting things for years. I just was not in the room.
