Sitting is Also a Step.

I often brag that I have the world’s greatest injury. There’s a chance that it saved my life.

When it happened, I tried to get it fixed. The doctor who was to do the deed wouldn’t. “Too risky,” he said, “if I slip, you’ll either lose use of that leg or die, and that’s not a risk I’m willing to take.”

The longer version: he’d have to thread his scalpel through the eye of an artery and nerve shaped needle that served, apparently, as a gateway to soft squishy bits of the hip socket that kept the structural bits from clanking.

I still don’t know whether he was impressively cautious or whether Army compensation charts were simply insufficient to account for what a mistake might do to his conscience. At the end of the day, it doesn’t matter. He refused and I figured it out.

His refusal got me grounded.

Grounded from rucking, grounded from field exercises and, when my division was called up ½ to Iraq and ½ to Afghanistan, grounded from deploying. That injury then joined forces with a glitch in the military’s administrative matrix and I escaped. At a time when no one I knew could leave, I was gifted a get-out-of-service-free loophole and left.

Hello law school.

Since then, that busted hip has carried two babies, run three marathons, and saved me from myself countless times.
You see, when I behave, the hip treats me well. When I don’t, a dull pain deep within that socket always sounds the first alarm.

The Hip Bone's Connected to the Knee Bone

A bit further down that same left leg, lies another, older injury.

A smooshed up, smashed up meniscus which, at fifteen, was so misshapen that, rather than patch it back together, doctors removed the offending tissue and replaced it with the promise that in my 50’s I’d curse them for it.

I’m 49.5.

I am cocky. Until Saturday before last, I was confident I would prove their predictions wrong. As life would have it, my ego was louder than the quiet pop I pretended not to hear. Instead of listening, I loaded the bar, pushed past that pop, and jogged home.

Now I hobble.

When I’m not hobbling, I am pouting.
Leg propped, knee packed in peas.
RICE RICE baby.

Well woo-woouldn’t you know it?

Years ago, in a thebodykeepsthescore kind of way, following her breast cancer diagnosis, a friend got me on this kick of googling “the metaphysical meaning of….” anytime I felt like my body betrayed me.

Trapped by RICE treatment, watching frozen peas work their magic, I start the search for meaning. Specifically, “the metaphysical meaning of knee pain.”

• Flexibility: This isn't just about physical suppleness. It's about mental and emotional adaptability—your willingness to bend your will, consider other perspectives, and adapt to changing circumstances. Stiff knees can often mirror a stiff or unyielding mindset.

• Surrender: This concept is often misunderstood as giving up. In the context of knee chakras, surrender means letting go of resistance, accepting what you cannot change, and trusting in the flow of life. It’s about releasing the need to control every outcome.

• Energy Flow & Moving Forward: Healthy knee chakras facilitate the smooth passage of energy, enabling us to move forward in life with confidence and without being held back by fear or past traumas. They are about our ability to take the next step, literally and figuratively.

• Humility and Respect: The act of kneeling is often associated with humility, prayer, or showing respect. Energetically, the knees carry this vibration of being able to bow to something greater than oneself or to honor the journey.

https://healing-sounds.com/blogs/chakras/knee-chakras-flexibility-energy

Oh yeah…

So last week's three-months-in-the-making blog post about relationships–you know, the soft squishy things that protect the structural parts of your life from clanking together–the things in life I don’t want to pay attention to because with enough structure strength stamina I can do it myself–the one that wasn’t getting written because I was going for a run and then going to the gym and then going for a run again because that’s the part I know and that’s the part that’s easy–if I’d just written that damn thing on my own the universe wouldn’t have had to stage an intervention by literally kneecapping me with a revolt of the soft squishy parts–

Great, just great.
I really hate it when I have no one to blame but myself.

The knee bone’s connected to the heart bone.

I am not an “everything happens for a reason” kind of person.
I dislike that phrase the way I dislike people who bring tuna sandwiches to team meetings.
But I do think everything happens for a lesson and our job is to find the lesson.

In Stack the Deck, health is defined as the ROI of the energy we invest in ourselves.
For me, even though I am admittedly intermittent about it, health energy has always been a 1:1 relationship with running. If I can run, I’m healthy and have the energy I need to make my way through anything.

This injury reminds me that, just as much as the hip bone is connected to the knee bone, the knee bone is connected to the heart bone. I would love love love to run run run my way into existential alignment, but so much is missed if we’re only on the move. Movement is important, but sitting might be importanter. Sitting lets us see more, slowly. The health ROI of energy we invested in ourselves isn’t limited to the physical. It requires just as much mental and emotional investment.

So now I sit, peas on knees, once again shuffling the cards of life I thought I’d finally started putting in the right order even though I know, full well, there is no right order. In this shuffle, I see how much I tend to default back into playing the cards I know how to play well. The game of life, though, is not about playing the cards we know well. It’s about playing well with whatever cards we're dealt, and opening ourselves up to experiences we’d never choose if every choice was ours.

We can pretend those cards aren’t in the deck and ignore them. For a while
Eventually, the dealer will do their job and deliver one we don’t want.
Inevitably, we have to figure out how we’re going to play it.

I led with a boast about having the world’s greatest injury and that boast leads with a doctor who refused to fix it for me. A refusal that changed the course of my life. Now, as I sit in stillness, the peas are thawing and the is pain melting into the plot: They patched my 15-year-old knee with the promise that I’d have to deal with the smooshed up squishy parts at fifty and then that very knee gives out as I'm using running to drag my creative feet.

I suppose that taking the next step has nothing to do with running and everything to do with not being able to.
I suppose I can work with that.
I suppose I should try yoga.

Rebecca Young | Speaker

rebecca@stackthedeck.net