Satisfying Stretch

☀️
You know that moment in the morning when you’re kind of laying there, waking up?
Maybe getting ready to get out of bed, maybe settling in for a bit of lounging while you check your phone for messages or scroll social media?

Then you give yourself a big full-body, satisfying stretch.

I love that stretch.

Every so often, when I would stretch like that, Jason said, “Man, I wish I could do that.”

His body was paralyzed from the chest-down.
He had no movement in his hands.
If you drew a line down the middle of his arms, he could use his triceps but not his biceps.
He couldn’t stretch.

He couldn’t do a lot of things that he wanted to do.
He sat on the edge of the field, watching and coaching, when he wanted to be playing.
He sat at the edge of the pool, laughing and getting sun when he wanted to be doing some trick off the diving board.
He admired the restored muscle car instead of driving it for himself.
He gave directions of how to tend the garden when he wanted to dig on his own.
He stayed at the bottom of the stairs when he just wanted to be able to get in.

People think that he was perfectly positive.
He wasn’t. He certainly had hard days and weeks and even some months.

But when it came to missing out on things that his body wouldn’t let him do, I didn’t hear him talk about that very much.

Sometimes he indulged in a moment of wishing. A chance to express his longing for certain physical abilities.
Sometimes he did that.

But usually he didn’t.
Those moments were rare.
He set those thoughts aside.
He chose different ones.
He knew they were real and valid and true.
But he also knew that they wouldn’t get him where he wanted to go.
They wouldn’t help him be happy in the circumstances he was given.

So, he made a different choice.
Every day he had to make a quiet but conscious choice of how to feel about living in a body that barely worked.

A morning stretch.
“Man, I wish I could do that.”
“I do, too,” I say in response.
✊🏻💙