Moving forward

I saw the trauma orthopedic doctor on Tuesday.  She was pleased with my progress.  Progress?  I’m making progress?  It surely doesn’t feel like it.  So she asked me what I was doing for PT.  Well… I was supposed to set it up with a therapist so I would be going 2-3 times a week.  I couldn’t figure out the insurance so I didn’t go.  I did go to the gym once a week to work on the exercises I had been given.

Here’s the thing.  I don’t feel like I am making any progress.  I am not responsible for my healing and it is slowing me down.  If I am not seeing the PT guy, I should be getting into the gym at least 2-3 times a week.  I should be doing exercises at home.  I am doing anything but.  Then I went to my friends blog…Moving Mountains. She had this great quote from Jack Sparrow.

Problem solving is what I like to think is my specialty.  But I am not solving my own.  I have to decide to be my own therapist (mental and physical) and take responsibility for how I feel and how I heal.  This is a hard thing to face.

Do you ever find yourself unable to solve your problems but others’ seem obvious and easy to solve?  Why is that?  Removing yourself from the situation and seeing it from a differing perspective is easy when it is someone else’s predicament.  When I was looking at myself, I was amazed that I made the circumstances so convoluted and confusing.  What a silly thing to do!  Everyone will do that though.  Just like my “progress” the situations people find themselves that seem overwhelming are due to incremental changes in physical, mental and spiritual aspects.  They are often so small that one doesn’t even realize these changes are occurring.

One of my favorite movies is “Rat Race.”  In this movie, the plot is set early that each person has been chosen to go after a $2,000,000 prize and the 1st one to reach it gets to keep it.  O. K. But each person has a radically different journey!  Some go to the airport, and the flights are cancelled.  Why?  Because another one of the competitors decides to pull down the radar tower.  You see this jeep being pulled up the tower with the two miscreants in full panic.  Then later in the movie, you see a couple of them suspended from a hot air balloon, holding on desperately to a cow whose hoof has been entangled in a rope attached to the basket, and fighting over the key 100 feet in the air.  How did they get to that situation?!  Incremental steps.

My progress is so small that I can’t see it, but my doctor, who sees me once a month, notices a difference right away.  So healing and destroying can be done incrementally.  This is the reason the gyms are crowded in January and empty in March.  This is the reason that the young kid thinks smoking is cool and then cannot understand why he has problems breathing.  Look at the bill boards–all of them promising a new start, a new plan and a chance to get life on track for success for January.   There should be bill boards that pop up in February saying, “Keep Going!  You may not see a difference yet, but you’re developing a new outlook on life and refining habits that will grandly change your life. ”  You won’t see any…

I know what I have to do now.  I need to schedule my recovery time in the gym and be faithful to it.