Moving by Jennifer Seidel
Most people don’t think much about moving. Moving your legs as you walk down the street, moving your arms as you reach for a glass from the shelf, moving your thumbs as you type out a message to a friend.
I never used to think much about moving either.
I suppose we’re always moving through time as well as space, often unaware of this movement, too. All things change in time, as they say, and time stops for no one.
But what I would have given to have stopped moving temporally, so that I might have maintained my ability to move physically for just a bit longer.
Time does move on though, like it or not. These legs that once carried me across the Andes and up the Alps and even allowed me to follow the footsteps of wild elephants, they no longer let me move as I once did. These arms that once carried bags across cities, lifted children in the air, moved fluidly across the expanse of a piano’s keys over and over again, they no longer freely flow through space.
Even my mind does not move as it once did. It was once a well-oiled machine, remembering, connecting, neurons firing just so to allow for conversations, creativity, solving problems as fast as lightning. Now, my brain moves like a rickety old cart with a broken wheel. I can still get places with it, more often than not, but I stumble along the way, and take twice as long to arrive.
Where once I moved freely across a city and throughout a day, I now must pause to calculate. I now must consider with careful foresight just how many moves I might make before I hit my ever-lowering limit.
And the cruel trick that my body plays with me is that it does not let me know when I’ve gone too far. It waits a day and then hands me the bill. I only ever know that I should not have moved as much as I did the day before. I never know which movement will turn out to have been the last of my capacity. And because of this, I now assume, I fear, that any movement I make might be the one that was too much.
So now, I barely move at all.
It’s a curious thing, to think about your body’s movements so carefully, so frequently. A walk in the park should be like the beating of your heart. You needn’t think about how long it will go, or whether you’ve asked for one beat too many.
But perhaps if I’m patient, just as time and my body conspired to move me into this reduced state of being that I now inhabit, so too will they agree to move me through this state and into another. One where I might move my legs across mountains once more.
One where I don’t even think about moving.