Seismic Stretching
through quicksands of uncertainty and across mental morasses
I’ve been called to grow of late. And it’s ripping me from some of my illusory foundations and roots, beckoning some new realities on to the horizon. I’ve known they would be features on this journey though they’re now very, very close indeed. Under my nose. I can sense myself sniffing at the air to smell their scent. Can almost feel their exhilarating and terrrifying heat and closeness ahead.
I wish I could grow as quietly and easefully as all the houseplants that surround me here in my work space, simply absorbing the sunshine, water and sporadic supplementary feed that fuel their green stretching and languid, leafy unfolding. But no, this growing is exquisitely uncomfortable, unsettling and causing me to thrash around with myself inside my mind.
I’m struggling to find order within a conflicting storm of thoughts and yet, also, fully aware that surrendering entirely to this head chaos and losing agency will also get me, get us, precisely nowhere at all. I will definitely drown; it’s not somewhere I can stay and survive.
There are big decisions to make, to move into the future / a future, and none of the choices seem either comfortable or a good fit. I can see myself standing on a giant paving slab with someone wielding a mattock at one corner, levering it up several inches so that I wobble and have to readjust my centre of gravity. Then, as I just about regain my steadiness, another mattock upends the opposite edge of the slab and off I wobble again. The mattock wobble cycle continues and all I can see ahead is me upending and falling over, ultimately. Either way. Which is a signal that it is me who needs to change as the available options aren’t likely to.
Sometimes, life throws us up a challenge that we don’t feel in any way equipped to meet or, indeed, one which we may believe we simply do not have any of the tools in the bag to cope with, mattock or otherwise.
A challenge which, however much we canvas opinion, excavate and research around the theme, it still confounds us with ambivalence. And yet, stubbornly and steadfastly it sits there facing us on the horizon and blazing as brightly at us as a rising sun, as much as we try to avert our gaze.
I’ve one of these kind of utterly confounding challenges scorching my eyes currently; how to compel my local education authority to grant my learning disabled teenager access to the future he deserves.
I’m feeling agitated and conflicted more often than is usual, this current and colossal challenge feels of giant importance and I’ve become so cranky and impatient with the waiting.
Some of my go-to strategies for down-regulating just aren’t giving respite or freeing up mental bandwidth as they usually would.
I’m leaving yoga class more frazzled and crotchety than I arrive. That’s entirely pointless.
Running has become a shoe-in of a slumpy slog rather than the normal forest freedom romp over tree roots and through a carpet of pine cones.
Creative and indiscriminate vegetable chopping is a stress relief ritual of old. That’s not delivering any solutions.
And my appetite for indulging in platters of fancy cheese has all but plummeted off the steep cliffs of a giant Comté; I’m not even turning to cheese to relax me?
I feel stuck and contraction is the opposite of expansion and always, always a state to move out of at the earliest. I tell my children this all the time. There are two energies in the universe; contraction and expansion and in every moment. It’s impossible to shift anything at all from a place of contraction.
We’re actively changing, expanding, in all of the micro moments of each and every day. Not necessarily in any particularly discernible way though, which can make it feel often like huge tracts of reassuringly similar ‘time’ elapse without barely a sensed change at all.
In lots of ways it’s all quite illusory, our understanding of clock time and psychological time are simply not the same.
We’re essentially just a giant sack of habits hanging off bone; habits we cling to and believe define us. Gathered and hoarded over a lifetime.
An accumulation of neurological responses propelled along in motion by a clunky skeleton, that’s what we are.
And yet uncertainty and change weave their silky threads right through each and every single day and our sack of wily habits fools us into believing otherwise.
I do a circuits class on Saturday mornings. It starts quite early at 8:00 am and is a half hour drive away along narrow, high-sided, dark country lanes which means the same wake up alarm as the weekdays.
It’s become a routine, a both physically painful and pleasantly sociable habit and one which tethers me to my weekend. A rousing ritual which punctuates the start of the ’S’ days and makes all the molecules in my muscles tingle and sting.
After today’s sweat fest in the pain palace as I like to refer to our gym - a particularly strong session and under an already hot morning sun - I came home to stretch my limbs, my back and my shoulders which had all turned up and dutifully toiled with me.
Hurling a rock-heavy, black medicine ball up to a height marked on a back wall. Leaping on and off a tall and sturdy, foam cube for multiple reps ( calling all twitch muscles … ) and cycling for short, vigorous stints on a disgusting contraption called an air bike.
The air bike is a heinous invention. This machine exhausts every muscle, shatters my mind, tires every fibre of my being and, quite possibly, burns the very marrow from within my bones. It’s a very efficient piece of killer kit and stretches my heart to the point of almost bursting beyond my rib cage.
Out in the garden on the heavily daisy-fied lawn and with coffee and a magazine, I lay down, exhausted. I have to stretch after exercise otherwise my muscles tighten, shorten and all the lactic acid builds up until the night arrives and then I will feel the dreaded and very horrendous doms - delayed onset muscle spasms - signalling intolerable aching and a night of interrupted sleep, turning and groaning.
The Doms are very unpleasant and painful. Full body stretching is the answer and I like stretching and always have done which is not to say that it too isn’t painful; it is. And this despite being good at it, limber. I can still do the splits even.
This is the legacy of teenage training in gymnastics and lots of expansion and physical opening up long, long ago in youth. I suppose I continued this by outstretching myself horizontally across floors during what seemed like a lifetime of perma crawling through the dirt with my small humans and some perpetually bare knee’ed jeans.
The jeans were absolutely not an expression of fashion. And with regular gleeful bouncing and somersaulting alongside small children on a garden trampoline where many mid-air conversations expanded both bodies and minds alike.
Whilst stretching today, I read
column in a recent and dog-eared edition of Psychologies magazine and it really got me thinking about uncertainty. About nature, about the places and rituals we retreat in to to steady ourselves during the life transitions which extend us beyond our current selves, our limits and our self-limiting. Transitions like this one ahead of me.I like Caro’s writing. I have her book * Twelve Moons * and am waxing towards the eleventh and penultimate, luminous chapter. I’m sometimes prone to feeling a little envious of Caro; for living where she lives next to the sea, for her lyrical musicality and for swimming in the swell of the mothering years with her youngsters still all paddling along beside her.
Caro writes of the repetitious reassurance of nature’s coastal rhythms where she lives in the North East of England, whilst contemplating uncertainty and relearning how to fear less.
She writes about being pushed beyond our usual knowledge and this being where we as humans most thrive. ‘The stretch zone’, that place slightly beyond the fluffy hearth-rugged perimeters of our comfort zone and the only real and genuine place for any opportunities of growth and change.
This is not a geographical place, this is an imagined, liminal one, yet one we often associate with an actual ‘somewhere’. It’s a way of being rather than a being anywhere in particular. That said, we can definitely chose to go to a somewhere to find it, this ‘space’ that must be made in our head for the all-important growing within the being.
Caro makes mention in her piece of a quote from Maggie Jackson1, author of Uncertain, ‘People who are intolerant of uncertainty think of knowledge as something like a rock that we are there to hold and defend, whereas people who are more tolerant of uncertainty are more likely to be curious, flexible thinkers.’
I’ve definitely held on to a few rocks in my time. Some of them gnarly, big, weighty boulders which I’d absentmindedly dropped into a mental pocket and persisted in carrying along with me for years and years. And some more years.
Slowing me, keeping me back, restricting me. Leaving no free space for anything but the unchanging solidity of the metaphorical rock. Silent contracts with a belief; sometimes a perceived belief within myself, sometimes an imagined belief in the space between me and another.
It serves no-one to travel laden with mega, meta rocks about their person. I’m thinking of a wolf and some small goats now and remembering cruel punishments from within a fairytale. That didn’t end well for him. And of Sisyphus too, he encumbered with his rock to heave over and over, up and down the mountain forever.
Caro writes about the beach near her home on the edge of the North Sea’s reach. I recognise the attraction of being at and absorbed into the sea, I’ve gravitated to it myself too during some huge life shifts. Putting oneself there at the margins, where the very certainty of the land meets open water, we are in a way inviting the weather and the water to change us.
To alter our very state from dry to wet. To soak us and drench us in salty choice. This is a space where we are acutely aware of the dangerous strength and force that the sea holds, strength and power enough to take us off and away within its swell. It forces us to consider our agency.
Those sandy ripples that slither in wavy lines across the wet sands, they feel fabulous underfoot and between bare toes, wet pressing shapes that massage fresh sensation and vitality into feet so fatigued and numbed by everyday footwear and overly familiar pathways. The sea awakens us to the fragility of life. It reminds us that it can take us if it wishes, toss us around and upturn us. Leaves a salty residue across our skin, fixes its crystalline presence crispily to our hair and its flavour to the inside of our throat. Being witness to its magnitude somehow, beautifully, allowing it’s energy and force to transfer into us. A kinetic exchange.
Like the tidal zone, this stretch zone we need our minds to inhabit to stay curious and learning new things, this is where all the magical happens; the swirly, rippling new rush of thought shifts and shapes within the mind.
I so recognise, a similar space Caro describes that I too have inhabited in parenting children through health difficulties and additional circumstances which placed restrictions and webs of complexity over other areas of life. I’ve felt othered and contracted at times, unable to match the pace and tempo that my peers, those around me and without disability in their midst, appeared to be gliding easefully along at in their lives. Or so it looked from where I was treading water in the depths.
I too took to running as a strategy and to discharge pent up energy fluttering within my nervous system which would build up and agitate me over the course of each day. I could sail swanlike through these repetitive days of perma-caring provided the reward of a woods run existed, to discharge the payload of cortisol congesting my arteries.
Similarly, I’ve four children, all several years older than Caro’s four. All officially adults now in fact, which feels strange and a little nonsensical to write as I don’t think of ‘adult’ as a noun at all and am finding myself cautious using it to describe them or to describe myself for that matter too. Adult is not really, in my view, so much a something that you become, well not permanently at least, and certainly not at the arbitrary birthday age of eighteen. Becoming adult post-dates this societal rubber stamp of a moment and by a long shot. I know of 75 year olds who have barely left their adolescence behind. I’d argue, some souls would need several lifetimes in order to reach a state even close to adult. I strive to ‘adult’ though often fall short.
No, being adult is much more nuanced than simply waking up and no longer being sweetly seventeen. I see adult more as an actual verb, a state of operating from. An internal process of remembering and bringing into consciousness all of the glorious, sensed gifts of childhood. Gifts that, through the living of life in our immensely difficult world, may have become dulled to us and have possibly fallen fully offline over time. Becoming adult is to have turned back to all of these first, sensed sensations, in an attempt to understand our earliest experiences and to allow these to signpost us onwards.
Children, if they’ve been allowed to enjoy anything of a childhood, have enjoyed being in their body, basking in curiosity, revelling thoroughly in consciousness, in the purest true present. Enjoyed all of the interoceptive sensations within their bodies, every event segueing into the next one, a string of present moments strung together like little pearls on a never-ending newness necklace.
Through a lived experience of absolute vulnerability as infants and toddlers, children are, from the outset, adept at living with profound levels of uncertainty and precious little control over their circumstances. Vulnerable in extremis. At the mercy of others. Children have a lot to reteach us about stretching, faith and trust if we allow ourselves to listen.
‘Time seems to stand still during childhood, in fact it doesn’t exist experientially. The time is ‘all present’, days seem endless and events just end and move on to the next one. Children are not so much adaptable as amnesic.’
This is what Veronica O’Keane writes in The Rag & Bone Shop, a book suggested as recommended reading for psychotherapists and coaches and currently teaching me lots about the HPA axis, the true reality of catatonia ( which is completely contrary to what I’d believed previously ) and the kind of hypo-firing hippocampal neurons which once caused me to buy the very same book for my Dad on three separate occasions during. the same. actual. calendar year. That would be on account of the sea of cortisol that was coursing through my traumatised younger self at the time. Back at the very start of parenting him. In all that merry Christmassy confusion of a birth. The book, the QI Book of General Ignorance by Stephen Fry, an immensely entertaining read although a book Dad needed to digest perhaps just the once.
My son’s childhood has ended, so I’m told at least. And he needs to move away and be apart from us all for a while, to allow him to grow into his fullest adult self, to self actuate. I can barely imagine how this will feel though feel certain it is for the best.
I have practiced it, the imagining, practiced feeling ready for this event. For years now, I’ve forced myself to hold this oftentimes wildly unimaginable vision, nudging him forwards and slightly away from me, from one new challenge steadily towards the next suitable one.
I’ve been raising him since day dot to enable this to be something that would blaze on an imagined horizon, a bright and warm, inclusive vision to edge towards. A rich future full of social connections, full of continued learning and purposeful prospects. I’ve encouraged him to also believe that this can be his future too. Just as I modelled for his neurotypical and abled siblings. Implored him to stretch himself in mind and body towards it. And this glowing light beaming rosily on the horizon, I think this may be our dazzling sunrise, the one time mirage we’ve been walking towards for so many years. For all the years since he landed here amidst such shock and commotion and in such a fragile and untenable condition.
He’s no longer fragile in the same way. His lungs, once weak and collapsed, can now expand so fully and efficiently that he powers himself in downland sprints, pulls seriously gymnastic moves on the gym rings and cuts through water in a pool like glass.
Where once those bellows in his chest and vocal chords could barely make any voiced sounds at all, they now belt out all the notes and to some GIANT tunes. Yungblud’s cover of the KISS classic ‘I was made for lovin’ you’ is the latest and sung at deafening volume in the car on repeat. Maybe ten, eleven times per journey? But that’s ok, I like it enough for now.
I enjoyed making these graphics to illustrate this post, even though the iPad is now straining and at maximum storage capacity, much as my brain feels.
And then his heart. A heart that originally beat so faintly and was so broken and incomplete inside that just to beat enough to keep him in life at all was a feat in and of itself. And now it thumps with vigour and thumps with love. For everyone. It thumps for a future which I have encouraged him to form in his mind.
All this stretching is hurting my brain. Allowing myself to hold an acceptance that this can and might just become a possibility for him, this college place, is one part of this exhausting challenge. Holding his fragile hope in my hands feels an enormous risk and responsibility which I’ve both facilitated and now have a need to deliver on. Believing that I can even continue to exist without whilst he is semi-permanently so very, very far away is just as tenuous a thread which I struggle, no matter how much I squint, to tease through the needle of my mind’s eye. Pleading that the authorities fund this future is still the very biggest headfuckery within this challenge.
Faith today feels as fleeting as the clouded yellow butterfly that just fluttered past the sprawl of pot plants beyond my window.