Sabbath

I woke up in the middle of last night in the throes of pure animal pain, the muscles in my calf tangling and choking themselves. There is nothing you can do except ride the waves of pain in a crumpled, whimpering heap. While I have spent this morning milking every bit of the limping sadness left to me still, I will never forget the morning after morning stretching to months that I would leap from my top bunk to the cold concrete floor after the nightly double cramps that would rack me every night of basic training. I can remember the electric shock of impact as I landed to muscles that told me nightly that they needed to be tended to and cared for. I learned to shuffle (instead of the required running) to the bathroom then back to my bunk to begin the morning ritual of cleaning that would never be quite good enough to spare us from the paired morning ritual of doing push-ups in our own sweat for punishment. All this with the muscles in my legs cleaving to themselves and the bone as if they had forgotten the natural assembly of relax and contract. Somehow, I would find myself on the PT field a half hour later, pushing or running or flutter-kicking, and I would discover that my legs had released me of their reasonable demands. I eventually learned to hold my consciousness somewhere just below wakefulness as the pain screamed at me every night and then let the scant dreams enfold me back on the ebb. Somehow, it became a sacrament of sorts, blessing my body and mind with the remembrance that I was human and not the mindless, heartless machine they would have me be. The weakness and terror of those moments was precious to me as the never-flinching shield of my days melted in the small whimpers of my night.

The work that brought me to this memory is wholesome and good, and I am glad for the chance of comparison that such a small but insistent part of my body can give me. And the comparison is kind. To now be surrounded by people that consider even this smallest and most habitual of pains something worth commiserating over and tending to. To find nourishment in both my labors and rest. This is what all of us are really searching for, is it not?