This weekend Erik and I spent some time at Bridges, our rock gym, where we’ve been going fairly regularly for the past few weeks. On Saturday we bought climbing shoes and went to our first bouldering class, where I trembled and whined my way up the 18-foot climbing walls and actually topped out (climbed over the top, coming down via an easier route designed for returning to ground level) twice. That was our first time properly bouldering, but we’ve been playing on the slackline each time we’ve gone to the gym. Yesterday we went to a slacklining class to pick up some tips and get in more practice — and then I lost balance on one of the lines and caught my foot on it as I fell, and the line threw me to the mats hard. I landed on my left ankle (the same one I sprained five years ago) and lay there, clutching my foot against the pain and just groaning: “Dammit! CRAP!” The first time I sprained this ankle I had a strong feeling of surprise, but this time there was an awful familiarity to it: that exploding sensation in the body, the knowledge of what had just happened, the knowledge of what was to come.
Erik went running for an ice pack and Damian, the gym’s owner, came over with a bottle of water, while I lay pushing my head against the wall (this was strangely comforting) and gasping and grimacing and waiting for the pain to subside. It’s astonishing how all-consuming even a relatively small pain like this is when it’s at its worst; it was all I could do to just breathe and respond to Erik and try to think through the situation. Later, after I was able to sit up and move around, Damian’s wife Jeffie and her sister Annie (who runs the upstairs cafe) popped over with reassurances and smiles, which I really appreciated. (This is why we’ve become so devoted to Bridges after only a few weeks’ membership!) I felt through the injury gingerly: I could rotate the ankle and put some weight on it and even walk around on the squishy mats, and there was hardly any swelling, so I was confident the sprain was only very minor, and much less serious than the one five years ago (which was itself not too bad).
This morning I woke up and my ankle was much stiffer, so much so that I couldn’t stand on it and had to limp around the house. Then I became worried, and though ice and compression have helped it over the course of the day, I’m no longer sure this is a less intense sprain than the last one. I’ve gone through the journal entries I wrote at that time and they read exactly like what I’m going through now, so it’s hard to know what to rely on: my gut feeling after I fell yesterday, or the knowledge that memory is fallible and that the memory of pain in particular is much muted with time. Yesterday I was hoping to be back on my feet and exercising in a week or two; now I’m afraid it may take longer. It’s particularly frustrating to be injured just when I was starting to build up new habits of movement: climbing, slacklining, using the gym’s cardio machines, dance, and of course my usual yoga and outdoor rambles. Yoga will probably be the first thing I can go back to after my ankle stops being so fragile, but my hikes will have to be confined to the paved trails for a long while, and unless my recovery is particularly quick and complete, both climbing and slacklining will be off-limits for a much longer period. Climbing and slacking require such dynamic balance, they’re probably among the riskiest activities for any part of the body that isn’t up to 100%. I’m incredibly grateful my injury wasn’t worse, but it’s hard to reconcile myself to giving these things up just as I’d really started to do them.
When I opened my favorite meditation book this morning for the first time since hurting my ankle, I read: “With unfailing kindness, your life always presents what you need to learn. Whether you stay home or work in an office or whatever, the next teacher is going to pop right up.” Anthony, one of my yoga teachers in LA, always says that injury has been his best teacher. I knew as soon as I fell off that slackline that it had happened for a reason, and I don’t mean that the hand of God came down and pushed me or anything like that. I fell because I was tired, because I had pushed myself beyond the point of clear focus and control. And I’d pushed myself because I was grasping and telling myself stories, which yoga and Buddhist meditation philosophy specifically remind us not to do. The concept of non-grasping, which I’ve mentioned before in relation to material goods, applies to more than just coveting objects; it also means we shouldn’t yearn for the world or for ourselves to be anything but what we are.* I was grasping when I looked around the gym and began to compare myself to the more experienced climbers and slackliners there, and to wish I was at their level. I was telling myself stories — which Don Miguel Ruiz describes in his books as our habitual escape from seeing things the way they truly are — when I started to imagine I was this cool, hardcore, athletic person, who could push through tiredness and soreness to do greater and greater things on the slackline. Objectively you could say that I was just getting into a groove and improving my balance little by little, but telling myself the story of my coolness made me forget that for the past twenty or even thirty minutes I’d been weary past the point of full awareness.
What’s interesting about this is that for most of those twenty or thirty minutes, I was pushing through my tiredness in a relatively safe way. I moved from the bounciest line to the most stable one, and I held onto hanging ropes to help keep me upright and in control of my movements. This was an appropriate way to deal with my increasing tiredness while still getting some more practice. But even this took a lot of effort, so after a while I knew it was time to stop — but that’s when the stories and the grasping kicked in and I decided I’d prove myself by doing one more balance on the bouncy lines. In retrospect I can see that this was an incredibly foolish thing to do — going from a stable line with ropes to a bouncy one with nothing — and it’s really almost inevitable that I should have fallen. In the moment of making that decision I stopped perceiving reality and stepped into an imaginary world. And that is the lesson: there is danger in swapping our own stories for a clear vision of what’s so. This is the truth that tempers my frustration at being injured. Where such potentially dangerous sports as climbing and slacklining are involved, losing focus from the reality of my limits and my physical/mental state for even one moment can be incredibly risky; I’m lucky to have learned this lesson at such low cost. My injury is just bad enough that I’ll remember the lesson forever, and it’s minor enough that it will heal relatively quickly and without lasting effect.
I’m going to keep up going to the gym while I recover, just to keep up the ritual. I’ll use their sauna to help loosen the joints (and it’ll give me a fun space for brainstorming the new story idea I got over the weekend), I’ll use their cardio machines and maybe get back on the slackline WITH THE ROPES ONLY if I feel up to it, and I’ll bring my sketchbook and draw climbers and practice perspective drawing while Erik works out. This injury has taught me an important lesson I needed to learn while starting such new physical pursuits, and I suspect it’ll teach me more about patience and humility, too, before my full recovery!
*Speaking of nongrasping, it has just occurred to me that the universe threw another funny thing our way this weekend. On Saturday morning I noticed a sale at a furniture store I’ve been wanting to go to, so Erik and I decided that we would go furniture-shopping after our bouldering class. But when we got to the gym, we found we had a flat tire — so we had to go get that patched after class, and we pushed furniture-shopping back to Sunday. On Sunday we decided: okay, we will definitely go check out furniture after slacklining class… and then I fell, and furniture-shopping was the last thing I wanted to do. It’s funny because I am rereading my old aparigraha entries and they’re all about furniture and how I decided to stop grasping for it. Okay, universe, I get it. We are not meant to have more furniture right now. Thank you humbly for the reminder. I can deal.
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