My left knee has been hurting for the past couple of weeks. When I kneel on it, it sends a sudden message of no, don’t do that, this isn’t good up to my brain, as if I’m pushing it down on some uneven surface. Given that, with an almost four month old puppy in the house, I find myself doing a lot of kneeling these days, this is far from an optimal experience.
(I’m pretty sure the whole thing got started because I accidentally kneeled a little too heavily on the bathroom floor awhile back, while preparing to clean the cat litter boxes; animals are not good for me, it seems.)
I’ve reached the stage in my life where it feels insincere to be as surprised as I am when my body aches like this. I’m firmly middle aged now, I’m 47 years old; this is the portion of my life when things are supposed to start aching and hurting for seemingly no reason, the part where my body takes stock of its situation and thinks that, all things considered, I’m lucky I’m not in worse shape and still able to get out of bed in the morning.
Adding to my complicated feelings about 2021 — they’re not that complicated, I hate this overly cruel, seemingly ruthless year — is the fact that I’ve spent much of the past twelve months dealing with physical ailments. My lower back has been in various stages of pain since the late summer, in no small part because it seems to flare up when I feel particularly stressed, and I’ve felt particularly stressed since… 2018, maybe…? Add to that headaches, buttaches, and multiple other thankfully temporary ailments, and it’s been an unusually painful year.
But that is, I guess, the point — this won’t be unusual moving forward. The house that I live in, that my body has grown into over the past nearly five decades, is in a state of disrepair now. I’ll have to take better care of myself from now on. Starting with, I suspect, less kneeling… or less grimacing when I do kneel.