Theme: I Am
Acknowledging our base level of existence
Chapter 2: Safety & Ankles
Diagrams of muscles and tendons are super gross. Ankles are gross. All us animals are just this weird, electrically charged stack of woven spaghetti with opinions, and any little pinched noodle throws the whole lumbering spaghetti monster out of whack. People are weird.
Safety
Anyone else who’s perpetually strained or sprained ankles can relate. For the most part we walk through our lives and when you take each step, you assume the ground is still there, and your foot will land in a given location without too much thought about it. But if the step is just a little further than you expected one day, or your foot lands at a weird angle, you get that split second of vertigo like Alice going down the rabbit hole. Something is terribly wrong. The world doesn’t make sense. Your ankle makes that horrifying crunch popping noise. Your mind blacks out from shock. And for a long time after you can’t trust anything. Maybe the ground won’t be where I see it. Maybe my foot won’t land right and I’ll fall unless I concentrate really hard on everything all the time forever. Maybe there’s something wrong with me. How do we rebuild trust in our surroundings, and rebuild trust in our own bodies after they’ve felt like they failed us doing something so basic?
Practice. Repetition. And time. We stop, take a breath, and survey our surroundings. We fix what we can. We take note of what we can’t fix to watch out for next time. We rebuild our foundation with the information we have, and we try the road again. And again. We fall. We lick our wounds. We get up and try again. We succeed. We celebrate our victories. We try something a little harder next time. We learn and grow and change our minds. We rest and recuperate. Or we don’t, and our bodies knock us over and do it for us.
Below are some links to different ankle stretches, which again require very little effort, so just go with it and don’t think so hard. Build yourself a reliable foundation. Steady your own spaghetti monster.
Jet Tries 