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lbb · 05-19-2011, 02:24 PM

Thanks, y'all. You're very kind.

The other thing I'd like to say is...the situation changes. Yeah, it's good to be accepting of the fact that your injury may never "get better"...but at the start, your definition of "get better" is usually something like "be as good as new". If you don't get the whole doughnut, it's like you have no doughnut at all, or none worth mentioning. But things change. Your body changes in ways you don't expect. Your attitude changes. Your horizons expand rather than closing down, and as that happens, you see solutions you didn't see before (or that you discarded as less than perfect and complete). You change. So, a lot of the time things do "get better" -- just not in ways that you would have imagined at first.

Another way to think of it is the difference between a 20 year old and a 50 year old. The 20 year old may be able to walk onto the mat and start training hard with no warmup, ignore pain, and get away with it. The 50 year old knows that she'd better warm up first, train with awareness, and deal with any issues afterwards. So, if you can't train like that 20 year old, would you say that you "can't train"? Well, some people do. If you look at a lot of middle-aged sedentary people, that's exactly what they mean: they used to be able to exercise in a thoughtless way, and now "I can't". They believe it. Because they believe it, for them it's true.

05-19-2011, 02:24 PM	#8
lbb Location: Massachusetts Join Date: Jun 2006 Posts: 3,202 Offline	Re: Healing Thanks, y'all. You're very kind. The other thing I'd like to say is...the situation changes. Yeah, it's good to be accepting of the fact that your injury may never "get better"...but at the start, your definition of "get better" is usually something like "be as good as new". If you don't get the whole doughnut, it's like you have no doughnut at all, or none worth mentioning. But things change. Your body changes in ways you don't expect. Your attitude changes. Your horizons expand rather than closing down, and as that happens, you see solutions you didn't see before (or that you discarded as less than perfect and complete). You change. So, a lot of the time things do "get better" -- just not in ways that you would have imagined at first. Another way to think of it is the difference between a 20 year old and a 50 year old. The 20 year old may be able to walk onto the mat and start training hard with no warmup, ignore pain, and get away with it. The 50 year old knows that she'd better warm up first, train with awareness, and deal with any issues afterwards. So, if you can't train like that 20 year old, would you say that you "can't train"? Well, some people do. If you look at a lot of middle-aged sedentary people, that's exactly what they mean: they used to be able to exercise in a thoughtless way, and now "I can't". They believe it. Because they believe it, for them it's true.