Results tagged “evolution” from Looking Up

So, it was as I predicted. I choked, I froze, I generally went to pieces on the baseline, and the court stubbornly refused to open up and swallow me. In short, I did more to demonstrate the importance of good sports psychology in one weekend than could have been achieved in a year of victories.

But for all of that, I came back from the weekend feeling energised and more enthusiastic about tennis. I remain a passionate believer in the vital role that sport can play in physical well-being for many people, especially after sudden disability. But there's something more and, not for the first time, I find an entry on Andrew Farrow's blog that is both timely and apposite.

For me, tennis provides me with moments of total focus when I am oblivious to all else. It was this sense of my 'mind quietened' that drew me to climbing and working at height (up a tree for example). This coupled with an acute awareness of every movement, and an almost hyper-reality that I felt which no doubt came from overcoming one's instinctive anxiety about being off the ground.

However, tennis involves something altogether less familiar and utterly fascinating. When playing under pressure, the body suddenly decides to do something completely different to what is asked of it. Instead of fluid hitting through the ball, the shoulder decides to get heavily involved and a simple topspin forehand becomes a drive that a pro-golfer would be proud of.

Please forgive me if it sounds like I am covering the same ground as in numerous previous missives. It's just that I think I am beginning to understand what fascinates me about the collapse in my co-ordination...

Over the last five years, I have spent many, many hours becoming extremely aware of my physical manifestation. The loss of function and sensation in one half of my body seems to have intensified my experience of 'how the other half lives'.

Coupled with this increased awareness of sensation has come a need to consciously think about how to look after the rest of me, the part I can't feel. I have had to learn how to assess circumstances or incidents in terms of injury risk without the signals that one instinctively relies upon. In other words, just because it don't hurt, doesn't mean it ain't broke. And fixing it is often more complicated, too.

I have learned how to balance myself and my wheelchair when even the tiniest movement can be enough to throw me off balance. There is a tendency among some in the SCI community to view people who still have functioning abdominal muscles as being able to balance and function like any able-bodied person sitting down. While it is true to say that I can sit upright in a chair without leaning on a backrest, it takes very little to unbalance me. If I reach out with one arm, for example, I have to work extremely hard to avoid losing balance, and I certainly couldn't pick up anything of even modest weight without holding on to something with the other hand for stability.

But all of this has become (almost) second nature, yet another example of our astonishing ability as a species to adapt and overcome profound adversity.

I still can't hit a tennis ball if anyone is watching, mind.

After a nasty bout of gastro for R on Saturday night, things are starting to return to normal. Spent most of yesterday with mops and buckets and numerous trips to the laundrette, the house suffused with the whiff of disinfectant.

And all the time trying to suppress the sense of unease at wondering if it's a delayed action waiting to strike us down next. So far, so good, but I'm still a little nervous. It's certainly not the best time to think back on what a Saturday night involved ten years ago. But then, that's generally the case with most comparisons as far as parenting is concerned. 'twas ever thus, I'm sure.

If you go back a little further, it's even fair to say that our generation have had an even longer period of carefree indulgence to reflect on than those who went before. There various reasons why this period of life has become so truncated compared to the previous experience.

a) Employment is less secure, so people take longer to settle on a career.

b) We are having kids later, in part because of a)

c) Essentially adolescent behaviour and consumerist habits are aggressively marketed to the twenty/thirty somethings in order to keep them spending money on computer games/alcopops/high fashion/new methods of communicating for longer.

And in the usual incoherent babbling style I am so fond of, it is the communication methods bit that I turn, particularly as it offers the most startling comparison.

Now, I have to be careful here, seeing as this is a blog after all, but with the advent of twitter, mobile e-mail/blackberry devices, Facebook walls and countless other methods of broadcasting our thoughts (yes, like this blog), have we actually got anything more to say than we had twenty years ago? OK, maybe we have, but is it actually worth saying?

Sure, Twitter supposedly instills a haiku-esque (how great is that piece of linguistic bastardisation?) economy of thought by restricting communication to 140 characters.

Also, it is true to say that modern communication technology has enabled news from different parts of the world to get past the usual mechanisms of information suppression.

But isn't the overwhelming majority of the information being communicated actually really rather trivial and unnecessary? Couldn't we do with a little more reflection? Are we evolving or regressing as far as our ability to communicate meaningfully with each other is concerned?

This is all leading up to the fabulous newspaper ad below. Could scheming ahead obviate much of our communication today? Should we, could we abandon careless use of the telephone? 

I have, from time to time, received complements about my coping and adjusting to life as a paraplegic. On some occasions, the complement has contained the statement,
"If it happened to me I wouldn't be able to deal with it the way you have."

And, I'm sure I would have had similar thoughts had it happened to someone I know. The thing is, you never know how you will cope until you have to. I spent far too long lamenting other setbacks in life that now pale into relative insignificance.

But what I am staring to appreciate more these days is not the 'heroism' of the individual, rather our phenomenal ability as a species to adjust to almost anything. Given enough time. Medicine now affords us more time to physically adjust, and our bodies adapt to sensory, circulatory, even fundamental skeletal changes. But we also have in us the ability to get used to profoundly different circumstances, to adapt psychologically.

Yes, I still spend a part of every day wishing I hadn't fallen from a tree and broken my back, and I'm sure that I always will. But when I look back to 2005, I find it staggering to remember how I felt then and how much time I now manage to spend feeling some kind of happiness and fulfillment.

No, it's not all the time, and certain things (oh, hi Spike) really do get me down. But on balance, I finish most days ahead on points.

I am truly grateful to all my family and friends for getting me this far, but I'd also like to thank all of my predecessors going back into that huge, Darwinian ball of possibilities that led us to this point. And to acknowledge the contribution of all of those people and animals that have gone before

Pride of lions one discovers that Zebra herd one makes good eating. Meanwhile, pride two discovers through polite conversation at the water hole that Zebra herd two (Zebrus ovum inflata gas mark 4) make a simply divine soufflé, as well as being entertaining guests. After one particularly delightful dinner party, Zebra herd two are making their way home across the veldt when they are set upon by Lion pride one and they are all eaten. Lion pride two are so appalled by this awful faux pas by their own species that they never venture out in public again, and they die of embarrassment. As the much missed Kurt Vonnegut used to say, So it goes.

Now, I'm not sure exactly the point that I am trying to make. That paraplegia is actually an evolutionary advancement? No, but perhaps there's a difference in the way that we now evolve. Before our species came along, change was a fairly ruthless process, and I'm sure that there were some perfectly good mutations that just didn't survive, even though they had something to offer. By the 'old' Darwinian model, having fallen from a tree I would be Sabre Tooth Tiger food. The difference now is that we have a sense of history, the evolution of ideas, if you will. New ideas can spread very quickly, and over a wider area, to affect more individuals.  I assume this is why, about two years ago, everyone started referring to the elephant in the room. A more interesting evolutionary puzzle, perhaps, is how the elephant got into the room in the first place, without someone noticing...

And here, my friends, I get to the task in hand. The opening of my blog. Oh, how I hate that word. Not quite as much as I hate 'blogosphere'.  How come we didn't spend most of the eighties referring to the 'filofaxosphere', or the nineties in the 'textosphere'? Grrrr. Language, eh? Can't live with it, can't have a decent conversation without it.

I do promise to attempt to make any further entries a little more concise and interesting, but for now I leave you with this thought:
"The chicken is just the egg's way of producing another egg."