It’s five-thirty in the evening, and I’m house sitting/dog sitting for a friend who lives slightly off the beaten path. It’s gorgeous here–quiet, peaceful. When I arrived over an hour ago, I was still in GO mode. I thought, I need to DO something, so I unpacked, made sure I knew where to find the dog food. But then I thought, Shit, I’m free. I can relax. So I turned on my music, poured a cup of hot tea, and moved my ass to the front porch. Thats’ where I am now. The sun is going down. There’s a slight breeze. There’s less tension than before.

This morning I saw my therapist. She’s just about the only person I’d wake up before noon for. To start our session, I read her blog #730, which I wrote this last Saturday and was the final blog for year number two of Me and My Therapist. In short, it’s about my beginning to own my strengths, give myself credit, and go easier on myself. My therapist acknowledged my progress. “It’s like your learning to ride a bike,” she said. “You’re up for sure, just swerving a little, finding your balance.” Yes, finding my balance.

I can do this.

This afternoon I saw my physical therapist. I use that as a generic term, since there are several therapists who work together in the office I go to, and they all switch off. It’s like tag-team healing. Anyway, today I got a new girl, an intern. I guess she’s currently in physical therapy school and will graduate next month. And whereas I’ve been impressed with the other therapists I’ve worked with since having knee surgery last December, I was completely impressed with her. Y’all, she was a total hard ass, constantly correcting my form and making me do things the correct way. “I’m picky,” she said, half apologizing. (Sorry, not sorry.) “It’s okay,” I said, thinking of how absolutely picky I can be with my dance students. “I need to do this right, so I can do what I want to do later.”

One of the things she corrected was how I both climb and descend stairs using my left leg (the injured one). As it turns out, in both cases, I was using my right leg A LOT to compensate without realizing it. This, of course, has been creating imbalances and keeping my left leg weak. No more of that. “I’d rather you not use that leg when going up or down stairs than use it and do it wrong,” she said. So now I have homework, which includes some new stretches to loosen up my quads and an exercise where I have to get myself out of a chair using only mostly my left leg (without pushing with my right leg or my arms–much). You should see me try this.

It’s that swerving thing again.

Honestly, despite the fact that I’m glad this girl was picky, this news about my doing things wrong for the last three months was frustrating. Why didn’t someone tell me sooner? My therapist says, unfortunately, a lot of people “phone it in” at work. Maybe they got lazy. Or maybe they didn’t have the knowledge. But you’d think they should have the knowledge, considering what they charge. What the hell ever, at least I know now. We press on.

It seems that in both my internal and external lives, I’m serving, working to find balance. Funny how the visible mirrors the invisible. I imagine this is often the case, that our bodies and even the entire universe conspire to heal us, to keep us from swerving all over the road of life and find that sweet, steady, balanced spot that feels like home. And perhaps swerving and even falling down now and then are necessary. After all, life’s road is anything but smooth. We’re bound to hit some bumps along the way. And surely these bumps create contrast and remind us that we can rebuild ourselves, that we can fall down and stand back up again stronger, freer.