Not a bedtime story.

hullo?......................!

HULLOOOOO..................?

anyone out there?...!!!

golly gosh its cold its dark its february and i have been away a long time.

(unfortunately im not able to train/play/sit for longer than 5 minutes/turn my head to the right most days from chronic back pain which seems to be the love child of multiple abusive parents namely; landing on concrete, sleeping all but on the floor, too much huge rucksack carrying when i was nomadic, lifting scaffolding and staging for my theatre job, and lifting kids in my teaching circus job. Add to that a centre that never got strong again after disengaging from shock during my fall last february, some hard core muscle tightening conditionning unbalanced by just as zealous stretching and then add in some cold weather and a new job teaching a technique that is nototorious for its impact on the body....i find myself in a new phase shall we say. My rehabilition began in earnest this friday after previously only dabbling with various treatments and rest. I am attempting to reboot coupling weekly acupuncture, physio and massage with 4 days total inactivity and painkillers, building up first with pilates and yoga,then long after that maybe a run, a hop, or maybe even a skip and a jump.....this is the most inactive i think i have ever been but im sure its good for me)

the mental parkour never ends...the downside being that each succsessive blog reads less like fascinating tail of physical adventure and more like a therapy session :.(!
However,i feel i have found something worth blogging about after a little walk tonight and im going to share that with you however pyscho babble it may sound rather than more moaning about injury. Tonight, I found another good little spot for training whilst walking. Actually its more of a stretch than a spot, a perfect training regime laid outfrom a to z running alongside the river covering everything from gentle rail balancing, a selection of precisions, some trees, walls, miscellaneuos creative oddities and rounded of with a monolithic wall run and nemesis level precision of the 'one day ...one day' kind. As ever its very exciting to find a training ground, a bit like finding a tenner on the floor; a spot of luck that you can look forward to enjoying later. But just as quickly the fear decided to tag along on my virtual journey.As I imagined playing on each patch the question 'can i do that?' was loaded through the circuit board and came back with no clear answer. I felt the fear and the uneasiness at the thought of facing up to uncertain challenges and started wishing i could make the feeling go away.

For some reason i started to remember a time when i was very young and incredibly scared of the dark. I used to wake up at night, begin to feel uneasy maybe by a goblin shaped slump of dressing gown or creak of floorboards that sounded like intruders footsteps and quickly become paralysed. I could barely summon the courage to call out across the house for my mum and when i did it came out as the smallest, inaudible whimper of a M...ummmm!. The logic i remembered running with was if the spirits hear im afraid they will come for me. And if i hide the fear i will be safe.

Later on and much older i realised the logic that if evil did exist and could fed off my fear to the point where it manifest and hurt me then i was the one 'creating' the evil and the fear by feeding it and that the upside was that i could also make it go away. As a 5 year old fear was inside and i would make it real by letting it live outside me. Conversely as an adult (sort of :.)) the fear feels very much in the world around me and making it go away is the the reverse process of trying to hide it from being inside. The railings are just as innocuous as the dressing gown but the fear still feels like shit.

The similarity with both tiny me and (increasingly larger cake eating) me now is that in both scenarios i would go from feeling safe and happy to vunerable and threatened simply by the question 'what if?' thrown out to the lions of a very active imagination. Previously the idea of finding your boundaries and challenging yourself seemed to me to go lke this;
normal life mostly comfortable, seek out challenges, they tell you about your boundaries when you come up against the fear that guards them. With this in mind Parkour equalled;
its scary dont dont it!
its scary but maybe you can do it anyway?
its scary but you can do it anyway and it feels amazing
its scary so do it,
go find something scary cause you can
go find someting scary cause you should
go find...geez im exhausted.

But actually even without this fear seeking we are testing ourselves all the time; throwing up test questions and then answering them against past, present and future events, forming a neural net than sustains the 'I'. If the answer is truthful it is also often mixed and rarely has the certainity which feels so comforting. Frustratingly I feel constantly trapped by this taunting question that i compulsively ask myself which is ' am i afraid of this?' and in that i give the vampire the invitation to come in, get into bed with me and f*"k me up. The reason this is so annoying is that i was drawn to Parkour as a way to feel free and now engaging with it makes me feel the opposite. But having a walk tonight i thought this; every time my brain sends out the question am i scared? what its actually asking is for feedback for the flipside question it cares about most which is 'are you free?'
and to that question the answer is a certain yes.

and i feel much better.
x