Tip Me Over And Pour Me Out
The other day, I talked about a sort of self-disabling event I’d backed myself into by pushing to get walks in when the weather got better, and then accidentally, if briefly, putting myself to (very limited) use at The Belmont Goats.
Yesterday I took my advice and tried to focus on rest and recovery. I did go to the goats again but only to get in the relaxation I didn’t get on Saturday. Nonetheless, this morning I awoke to some of the deepest physical and psychological bone-tiredness I’ve felt in quite awhile.
The impact upon my capacities of even brief work has grown more significant over the past six years or so. (It had been declining before that, but the disastrous Vocational Rehabilitation job placement in last 2017 was an acceleration.)
At any rate, I thought this afternoon about what I’ve written before about anticipatory control being better than compensatory control; specifically the example from Caroline Criado Perez’s Invisible Women about being in a car.
When you’re walking, you are in control of your movements. You know what’s coming. On a ship, or in a car, someone else is in control—unless you’re the driver. “The driver knows what the motion of the car is going to be and so the driver is able to stabilise his or herself in what we call an anticipatory fashion,” explains Stoffregen, “whereas the passenger cannot know in quantitative detail what the car is going to be doing. And so their control of their own body must be compensatory. And anticipatory control is just better than compensatory control. You know, that ain’t no rocket science.”
It came to mind because at one point as I sat here in my swank, orange swivel-rocker drafting a couple of blog posts, even the slightest motion had me reeling like I was about to tip over.
Whatever the current constellation of my resource depletion and my dyspraxia, it seems precisely to be the amount needed for me to have almost no anticipatory control. It feels as if someone else is driving my body, and I’m just along for the ride.