Kathy has been coming five or six days a week for something like fourteen years. You would think we would have her fixed by now.
A while back she wrote Peggy thanking her for voodooing her knee. It had been screaming. The next day she walked back up the hill from the Regatta Parade and it was not screaming anymore.
Fourteen years was not enough.
She never left.
We have watched people start just about everything. Diets. Walking. Stretching. Strength. Yoga. Qigong. They were going to do it for the rest of their lives.
Until they didn’t.
You get sick. You go on vacation. The knee starts up. Somebody needs you. You miss Tuesday and Thursday and pretty soon it has been six weeks.
Or you get bored. That one does not get enough credit.
We turned consistency into a character test. Good people keep going. Weak ones quit. After this many years of watching actual human beings, I do not think it works that way.
Linda started with us sitting on the bed to put on her pants and socks. A couple of years later she could do it standing if a wall was nearby for the wobble. Five years in she could dress in the middle of the room.
She still sits to tie her tennis shoes. She is not Peggy.
Good.
The point is not that she became perfect at putting on underwear standing up. The thing kept changing with her.
What we teach today is not what we taught in 2012. Thank God. We dropped things. We changed a movement because somebody’s shoulder hated it. We spent ridiculous amounts of money learning something and kept three pieces.
Peggy will still stop class because a foot moved half an inch.
“Wait. Do that again.”
Sometimes I did not even see it.
There is no finished program we are marching people through. There are the people standing in front of us today.
One woman said she wanted the joy in movement. A practice she might even look forward to.
I like that better than fourteen years of something you hate because it is good for you.
Consistency sounds like never missing. Never getting derailed. Never eating the pastry. Never sleeping in. Never having the knee go bad or six weeks disappear.
That is not what we have watched.
People leave. People come back. What worked three years ago stops. Something that did not work suddenly does. Somebody uses the wall until they do not need it. Somebody needs the wall again.
Use the wall.
The people who last are not always the ones who never wander off. They are the ones who know how to come back.
That goes past the studio.
There are things you used to do that made your life better. Not because a stranger said so. Because you know they did.
You walked. You cooked. You read. You called somebody. You went outside. You played music. You took a class. You had coffee with somebody every Thursday. You went somewhere that sent you home a little more like yourself.
Then something happened. Or nothing happened. You just stopped.
This is where we blow it. We decide going back means going back all the way. Five days a week. Thirty-day challenge. New shoes. New app. New plan. Monday.
Always Monday.
I would not.
I would go back once.
Take the walk. Make the food. Call the person. Pick up the book. Go to the class. Ten minutes if that is what you have.
Kathy didn’t need fourteen years to arrive somewhere and be finished. She kept showing up.
That is closer to taking care of yourself than anything I have seen on a streak.
Not a perfect record.
A way back.
Go back once. See if it still belongs.