9:00AM
My knee just cracked. Finally. I had been feeling a need for it to crack for about 30 minutes and maybe sitting down did the trick.
For the last year or so, I’ve felt unusual tension and cracking in my joints. I think my body overall has felt quite tense—maybe from not “succeeding” enough, having a lot of uncertainty in my life, or believing that I always have more work to do. Regardless of the cause, something perhaps I may explore at a different time, at this moment I’m going to focus more on the effect.
I believe that so many of us have things happening with our bodies that we don’t tell other people but inevitably affect them anyway. Perhaps we have consistent and powerful headaches; maybe we have indigestion or constipation; or we have intense muscle or back pain.
More often than not, we don’t tell people what’s going on—well, directly that is. We may shout at them, insult them, ignore them, condescend them, or shower them with jealousy, when really it has little to do with them and more to do with our bodies at the moment.
When I wake up and feel tight, groggy, rushed, sore, and unsure why all of it is happening, I will often be very short, annoyed, and gruff with people who are interacting with me. Sometimes I’ll think it’s them that’s causing this reaction and many times I’ll realize it’s because I didn’t sleep well. In other bodily scenarios, like hunger, consistent pain, etc., I think I’m less likely to recognize how much my body is contributing to the conflict I’m having with the other person.
I believe, however, that when other people are short, annoyed, or gruff with me, I rarely attribute it to their body. I’m trying to get better, to remember that what I’m doing or did probably brought no more than 50% of the emotions to that person’s current state, and yet it’s so easy for me to forget. I think they dislike me, want me to leave them alone, or didn’t like what I said. More likely than not, they’re probably already feeling something in their body that contributes to their reaction.
So what to do with this? One, take care of my body. Two, tell people what’s going in my body. Three, realize that other people have a lot of stuff swirling in their body that I’ll never know and is probably causing their external interaction. Four, remember to breathe?
Our bodies are us, we are our bodies.
