PT

My knees started to hurt, so I am seeing a physical therapist, and it's amazing. Last week my guy showed me a core exercise (the "dead bug") that I had not thought would be possible for me, and it turned out that I could totally do it. It was exciting! The next week, he started me on side plank, which I was terrified by, but he helped me do it with strength, and what do you know, it is in fact possible for me. Such an experience! I show up, and he doles out increasingly challenging things for me to do, and I do them, and I get stronger!

I left that day thinking, if only life were like this. In PT, you are not faced with challenges that are too hard for you. No one asks you to do such things, because they know you would injure yourself. Instead you are given a steady progression of increasingly challenging things that strengthen you in specific ways, so that you can eventually do things that you had wanted to do but couldn’t. What a wonderful system. Life, on the other hand, hurls challenges at you almost randomly, and some of the challenges might be beyond your strength. I guess you have to learn to recognize the ones that are too hard, and figure out how to say no, so that you avoid injury? Does it work like that?