feeling good feels really weird

from Will Happiness Find Me, Peter Fischli & David WeissNow that I'm 99% out of pain and 100% done with pain meds, it's a funny, funny feeling to be just me again, to be finding my way to some modicum of fitness, to enjoy moving without the limitations I lived with for 8 months of my life.

But I have to admit:

Feeling good feels really weird.

Like it's totally unfamiliar, you know?  Like I forgot that it was this easy to pull the clothes and sheets and towels out of the dryer, carry them to the bed, fold them, no protecting my left side, no standing on one foot.  So easy to pick things up, tie my laces, grab containers for my lunch.  

It's crazy how fast we can adapt to pain and limitation. How rapid is the contraction away from anything that makes it worse.  Having lived in that contracted state for so long, it's a funny, funny thing now to be able to expand again, let go, relax.

Today was the second day in a row I woke up without a headache, with only a smidge of a memory of the former pain, but really so very free of it, so free.

It's big, this freedom.  I feel like I can do anything.  OK, I lie: I am so out of shape after almost three months of virtually-total idleness than walking to and from the dogpark, 1 mile each direction, is soooo long.  But yeah, still I feel like I will be able to do anything, as I build back my strength little by little, doing that small walk now, but knowing that soon it will expand, too, and I'll be back to what I used to do before, albeit with a new awareness.

Because even though I'm free now, I can't forget what it felt like to be so limited.  I never want to go back there again, and I'll do anything -- I'll grow some sense -- to make sure I never do again.  

Sure, I'll go back to yoga when I'm ready.  I am craving a strong practice.  I am craving sweat and effort and that delicious wrung-out exhilarated feeling that follows a really great class.

But for now, it's just the one mile there, one mile back.  Expanding back out gently, no big rush, enjoying this weird feeling of feeling good.