Have you ever had a really bad day, as if life itself was beating you, and you just decide to … dance? I mean, rock on hard, dance as if you are Hugh Grant in Love Actually, and the world – which has beaten you to the pulp – is now really kneeling at your fingertips? Well, if you have never felt so low, you are fortunate. While I must say emotionally it is not a regular occurrence, physically, it’s almost every day for me. Especially, if say, I want to actually try to do something fun – like ride in my amazing tank chair. A seemingly simple activity like this drains all of the life and energy out of my body, and I am thus left feeling with the equivalent of a damp rag of a skeleton where my body once was while it takes it’s necessary hours to recover.
In this period with my body as a noodle, my mind is not able to turn off and sleep as well – you have to love Murphy’s Law- though it is not even alert enough or able to process much of any thought, let alone remember it. As I take no medicine or know of any pill to help (after all, no doctor can explain what is actually occurring to either cause such deep fatigue, or more puzzling, how the resting need is so acute), my tonic is simple: music.
My head phones are placed over my ears and the jamming begins. The music itself can vary, though most often it’s some form of classic rock thrown in with contemporary opera, country, new age, – and well, just about any song that ever caught my fancy that my iPod shuffle goes to next. And I play it loud. The vibrations go straight to my heart and slowly my ice cold hands, feet, arms and legs begin to return feeling and color, as in my mind I am dancing on the ceiling. It’s freeing, it’s liberating, and it restores my soul and attitude to being gun-ho, gally-up, hoorah, and all the other one word sayings that simply mean: rock on.
By the end of the resting period / jam session, I am no longer blue, most of the time coherent, and able to move and bear the normal capacity of weight barring in a transfer. Yet, as odd as it may seem, I am more tired after the mental dance off then before the rest. (Partly because when I am so blue I don’t feel so much as tired like I vaguely recall it felt like after a normal work out – rather that I have an elephant sitting on my body and squishing my brain, and partly because I really am fatigued because I just got my heart rate and blood pressure up and back to normal).
While it’s a tight rope of an ordeal not to jam out too much (though, too much of a good thing, is still a good thing) and restore myself for the next task as soon the recovery is over, it is without a doubt one of the best medicines life ever produced. No matter what, just rock on.
(And to those that personally know me and have come in to find me with my eyes closed and my head phones on, yes, now you know what I was doing).
Originally published at livingasamystery.com