Sarah’s Writing
Sample Essay: Run, Run Because You Can
On a run to the garbage room in my apartment building one morning, in the early hours, when just a few of other tenants are just starting to rise, I stopped in the hall. I ran my right hand, my “good” hand, along the wooden banister mounted on the wall. I do not remember what I was thinking, or where the irrepressible urge came from to suddenly move, but I found myself lurching as fast as I could down the hallway. And my left leg, which has limped its way through life for several years, fell into step with my right in a clumsy, running gait. For the first time in nearly five years, I ran.
Movement is one of the freedoms that we take the most for granted. It is viciously tangible and absurdly simple. It’s energy, both kinetic and potential. It is precision and beauty, whether it’s lifting a finger or performing a pirouette. It is infinite; your body is always moving in some way, no matter how still you think you are. Control of one’s body and its movements (the voluntary ones, at least) is one of the few things in life over which one has absolute control; it’s the very mechanism by which we do what we want to do, get where we want to go. When you get right down to it, if we do not move, we die.
Small wonder that we start to feel mournful and frightened, even panicked, the moment the smallest part of our movement is compromised. It is a complete reversal of the universal order. I want to move, and I do. Obviously it is more complicated than that; there are physiological processes at work, but I am mostly unaware of them. I only know that I want to move, and I do. How miraculous is that? How wonderful is that?
So miraculous and so wonderful that one can only be fully aware of it when one desperately wants to move and cannot. The reasons could be due to restraint or biology, and they may be with good or ill intent; it does not really matter. We see the ability to move as a fundamental right; to have it taken away temporarily, even for a very brief period, seems an assault on our freedom, on the essence that defines who we are. An uncomfortable regression occurs, in degrees varying with each case), to the infant state of having little or no control over what is done to us. Reduced personal independence, so highly valued in our culture, and forced acceptance of an uncomfortable state of vulnerability is the cruel double blow attached with restricted movement. It is the work of two lifetimes collapsed into one what may be a very small space of time: learning to ask for help and learning to trust that people will give it.
You can’t move. You will cry and you will get angry, because everything changed and you did not want it to, and you’re scared of what changes are going to be in store. You will feel sad at your losses; perhaps your mobility will be affected, perhaps your career, perhaps even your ability to talk or eat, or to take care of your daily needs. As you face life now, life as it has become, each day, the stark uncertainty of the whole business grabs you and hold you in the now. Perhaps you have never been there before; it may feel odd to realize that neither dwelling on the past nor trying to project into the future of your new life will change the present moment, the moment in which you cannot move.
But you are moving. You are tunneling, tunneling, tunneling to the core of you to find the part that still moves even when you cannot tunnel anymore. It is terrifying, but if you can believe, just a tiny bit, that your ability to move your life is not contingent on your ability to move your body, you take a tiny step back into the world of the living and a giant step towards discovering the true nature of your humanity. The truth is that our bodies do not move us, we move in spite of them.
Strip away the use of my arms and legs, perhaps even of my vocal cords or the muscles in my throat. You cannot stop the stirrings in my soul, the ever-present motion in my heart that reminds me that I am loved in spite of my physical disabilities, that I too can love, and that I need to love. You cannot stop the gentle dance of my spirit that prompts me to reach out to others in compassion, and to live in gratitude for those who have reached out to me. You cannot change my growing conviction that not only do our bodies need movement and constant change to survive, but that our lives do as well (perhaps even more so).
I only just started to run again a couple of weeks ago. I’m seeing now that I never really stopped. The part of us that makes us who we are runs faster and freer than the wind.