People always told me that when you have kids your perspective on the world changes. I never believed them, until my son arrived. Watching him explore the world and learn how it works has opened my eyes to a way of being that many adults, including myself, have forgotten about.
All of his actions are performed with a wide eyed enthusiasm. He’s willing to give anything a try at least once because he hasn’t learnt to hate on things yet.
He doesn’t take no for an answer either. He’s spent the last few weeks learning to walk, and if you’ve watched someone learn to walk then you’ll know it involves a lot of falling over, and my son’s no exception, but most of time he just picks himself and tries again. He doesn’t associate falling as failure, he just sees it as part of the process.
Keep on stretching
It’s really easy to justify not moving when you have Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, I would do it all the time. I’d tell myself that it wasn’t worth getting up because I would feel tired after and then I’d just have to lie down again, so why bother getting up in the first place? It seemed like a valid argument to me, but the problem with this mindset was that because I’d remained static for so long my muscles had contracted, because they weren’t being used, and this in turn made it harder to get up and move around, because now it hurt when I tried. My muscles were fighting against me, instead of doing what they naturally wanted to do, which was to move. I found that I’d got myself stuck in a viscous cycle where I didn’t want to move because it was too tiring, and now I couldn’t move because it was too painful, and also tiring.
So what was the solution?