December 25, 2005
What I Got For Christmas
I got a pulled muscle in my back! I was exercising in my father-in-law’s home gym, only with too much weight and — boop! — there goes my lower back again. It tightened up like bowstring. I knew I was in trouble, but maybe I could continue, I thought to myself, lying.
So, did I stop? Nope. I kept going, only with no weights, thinking that I could at least get a few more exercises. After about twenty minutes of pushups, curls, and the various stretches I like to do, my back felt okay, so I decided to go for a short and easy jog around the neighborhood. It wasn’t until I was a mile away that my back fully started locking up, and I experienced what surely must be the hell and torture of old age.
Now, I ask you to keep in mind that I’m a relatively young man who enjoys relatively good health, so when I was one moment jogging along, a little damaged but generally fit as a fiddle, and then the next moment I was hunched over and shuffling along like an old-timer, well, that was just a little more illumination about the realities of aging than I was expecting. It was torture. I felt a boa constrictor bind the interior of my lower abdomen and hips to the point where I could barely walk. I returned back to the house, (oh, by the way, it started raining on me too) and stretched my back some more and took a very hot shower and thought it was all over, until I bent over to put my shoes on. Oh my god the pain. I couldn’t do it. I could not even put on my socks. I had to stand at the base of the stairs and lift my foot up on the fourth step and with gingerly care slip my sock and shoe on, waiting for a shockwave of pain.
Well, I’ll be alright, I hope, but if this is the way old people live their lives, with this kind of pain, I understand why they’re sometimes cranky, why they sometimes complain, and why they sometimes seem to have it so rough. Meaningless difficulties like this are the toughest to make sense of — although my painful experience was rife with meaning: don’t do such a stupid thing, and increase the weights I lift in small increments — but old people have already learned those lessons, and their pain is meaningless. Or is it?
Posted by Rob at 11:44 PM | Comments (0)