Why is it that the words we lose always feel like the best words? Those words that disappear into the mists of the ether were definitely great words, not the usual run of the mill mediocre words. *sigh*
I guess I’m getting over it already. But I am definitely including those now disappeared and almost forgotten words in my word count for the day.
Today marks the end of the second week of my Write Plan. It’s not gone so well. Oops, I guess I’m on the wrong blog for writing about writing. All right, I will not post that update here. Instead here, yoga thoughts!
A year ago, I was sure that I was never doing a side plank. (I promise, when I’m in a side plank, my expression is nothing like the one that woman is wearing. I’m probably not nearly that high off the ground either.) So, obviously, I was wrong about never doing a side plank otherwise I wouldn’t be writing about it, but actually, two things interest me about the side plank.
The first is how a little change, a tiny piece of advice, can make a huge difference. C and I were talking about it, me still on the “ain’t never going to happen,” but with a recent try-and-fail to my name, when she said, “You have to lift your hips.” Hmm. Interesting thought. I tried again the next time it came up in my yoga podcast and bang, there I was. I can’t really explain the dynamics — I don’t have the vocabulary for kinesthetics or motion — but in all the different ways instructors described how to do side plank, the idea of lifting hips high was either never included or never sunk in. And what a change. The lower your hips go, the harder the pose is to hold. The energy of holding your body up like that is coming from your core and side, not your arm and feet. I’m not going to say that it’s made it easy, but today I held side plank on both sides for the full count (or almost) which would have been unthinkable a while ago.
Which brings me to the second thing that’s interesting to me about side plank — how quickly one can go from “impossible” to “routine.” School was always easy for me. I never had the moments of struggle with a problem I didn’t understand or a thing I couldn’t learn, but as a parent, watching R try to read, I had this faith that he could get it, would get it. It wasn’t irrational, but his learning disabilities looked so dramatic that I had been warned that it wasn’t likely. Well, he did get it, and now reading is routine for him. But that move, from impossible to routine, it’s awesome. I want to describe it with a miracle synonym that doesn’t have any religious connotations, but the ones the internet gives me aren’t right at all. But it’s like life achievement points, leveling up in the game of yoga or school or whatever your challenge goal is. I’m thinking about this because on the one hand, I think it’s ridiculous to find such a sense of satisfaction in my body being able to do something that it has never, ever, ever *needed* to do — it’s not like mastering brain surgery and saving a life! But on the other hand, leveling up is leveling up and it’s gratifying, even when the end goal is trivial.
I’m still feeling sad about my lost words. They were good words, so maybe I’ll start trying to retrieve them. But first I’m adding a category for yoga, because apparently doing yoga every day means a lot of thinking about yoga.
We have the same reading issue with my grandson and reading. I can tell he wants to but there is some mental block keeping him from completely getting there.
How old is he? Because I attributed R’s problems to reluctance until he was 8 when I finally got him privately tested. He turned out to be profoundly learning disabled, a classic example of traditional dyslexia (now called language-based learning disorder, although he’s also got the math-based learning disorder.) His school, incidentally, thought he was fine, which is the peril of a smart kid with learning disabilities — they can fake it enough to get by and they, of course, don’t understand how to explain what’s happening.
When I went home from the first (devastating) meeting with the academic psychologist and said to R, “J says that M and W are alike to you because you see things in three dimensions, not two,” his response was “Yes, and 3 and E — why do they all have to be the same?” I had to think about it to see that 3 and E are actually the same shape as M and W, but of course, R never knew how to articulate what didn’t make sense to him in a way that made sense to me or his teachers.
Schools can be reluctant to test because it’s expensive, but an early diagnosis is HUGE for kids with learning disabilities. A first grader who gets help can be remediated and on track in a year, but a sixth grader who is finally diagnosed after struggling will have missed enough learning that they’re likely to always have a tough time in school. Good news, though, is that learning disabilities are the only known defining factor of successful entrepreneurs! One-third of successful entrepreneurs had diagnosed learning disabilities in some study from a few years back (results which were a surprise to the researcher, who was looking for common features and found only that one.)
He’s 14. He’s been homeschooled and his mother has a learning disabled teaching degree. She has managed to do A LOT that would never have been done at public school but she hasn’t managed to get over the reading hurdle. I think it would probably be valuable to test him even though it’s late.
It’s funny but he often talks of having his own business of one kind or another. Now he has the added drawback of a heart condition that is very scary. CPVT. His heart could go out of rhythm at any time and not come back. It terrifies me.
He is a former kick boxer. Now he and I are trying to establish a walking routine but the damn weather keeps getting in the way.
If he wants to go to college, it would be worth the testing, because if he has a learning disability, he should be able to get appropriate accommodations. A blind student wouldn’t be expected to manage ordinary textbooks; a learning disability presents a similar situation, if less visible. R gets annoyed and prefers to pretend that it doesn’t exist, but it’s much better, IMO, to be able to choose whether to use the accommodation (ie, untimed tests, books on tape, etc) then to not have it at all. And that heart condition sounds scary! I would be terrified, too.