I nearly just crushed my number four toe on my left foot, however, I had to look to see and see which foot it was, because it could well have been the number two toe on the right foot. It was definitely the left, it had impacted with a somewhat unyielding box under my desk. There was big pain. Despite considering myself to be in good health with a happy diet and exercise, I accept that injury will also be present, both through questionable spatial awareness and outright stupidity.
Now many of my daily injuries I no longer notice. Door frames neatly marry with shoulder blades, radiator pipes are the twins of my little toes, really heavy objects are obviously asking my feet to ‘bring it’ and they do, with both force and precision. I find random bruises and cuts, but this is all good as if I haven’t noticed doing it, then clearly it didn’t hurt!
Occasionally though, my acts of injury are somewhat more spectacular. Domestic endeavour is truly not for the faint of heart. I was once winding up a vacuum cord and got slightly too much momentum, cracking myself squarely in the head with the plug, which knocked me to the ground. After washing up once, I bent down to pick up an errant spatula from the floor (it had tumbled down from my ‘how high can I stack my washing up’ personal challenge) and I stood up too quickly, thumping my head into the handle of a particularly heavy saucepan. Also ended up sat on the floor, somewhat bemused with my new immediate surroundings. I have been knocked over a fair few times by other people shutting the boot of the car on my head, as I have dived back in to retrieve something and it is probably best never to share the details of the swollen knee I ‘won’ by walking off the pavement into a parked van when playing the eyes closed challenge. It wasn’t a good game.
I guess that there are parts of ourselves that will always vex, always try us a little bit. Things that we keep doing without really understanding why. Most of my injuries come from lack of patience or forethought (and some do come from idiocy) so perhaps this is where I need to focus my efforts, taking my time a little more, and attempting to be a bit more gentle with my body.
Learning to look after ourselves better can be a really hard task, we simply get used to certain things and accept them as perfectly okay, they have become familiar. Looking at these things and working out how to make improvements is the easier bit, learning how to put those into practice is where we can genuinely make improvements to our lives, and that bit is harder.
Map Point. How can I stop hurting myself?
Shiny journey 