Compared with the ones science fiction writers envision, mine isn’t particularly exciting.
It’s more cluttered with what my wife calls “dumb junk” than your average long term storage unit.
For long stretches of time it seems to be inhabited with things like mate-less shoes, expired coupons, dust-infused Christmas decorations and power cords that go with nothing.
And among all that jumble float fragments of dreams and strange ideas.
I was stretched out as best I could be in front of the TV the other day dripping sweat through a Pilates video when one such notion made the jump through a worm hole from my alternate universe into the real one.
It was a little fictional scene that involved a trip to a physical therapy facility for an assessment of my body’s flagging flexibility.
After carefully taking a broad range of measurements during a thorough exam, my therapist looked over the form on her clipboard, and the expression on her face showed the categories it offered were inadequate to describe the state of my inflexibility.
She then uncapped her felt pen, scribbled and drew two bold lines beneath a pair of Latin words she’d written to describe the state of my stiffness: rigor mortis.
It seemed a little harsh.
Then back here in the real world, something strange happened.
On the same video I’d been watching for years, I began to notice things I never noticed before.
They were little things: The way the leader raised her hips and legs toward the ceiling at the end of the corkscrew; a slightly different body positioning in a lower abs exercise that took strain off the neck; the encouraging tone in her voice.
As slight as they were, they were real differences that changed the way I was doing those stretches I’d done for years.
And oddly, the new way of doing things seemed right rather than weird. What seemed weird is that I had used that same video repeatedly for years and apparently never seen what was really there.
As of late, I’ve been noticing those same kinds of little things all around me. It’s not like a shift in everything. It’s more like discoveries of a scavenger through my daily life.
I’ll find a different note or tone in a song I thought I knew by heart.
I’ll notice something slightly new about a friend’s way of doing things, and I understand the person more clearly. I don’t always like what I notice, but it takes me to a new understanding.
I’ll be thinking of how to write a story or play a pattern on the drums and the way to plan it out or practice seems obvious.
I seem to have arrived in a more ordered alternate universe.
There’s a word for this whole process.
It’s called learning — not learning of the sort that involves a test or anything like that.
It’s just everyday learning, the process of noticing and figuring things out, getting from point A to B a little more easily and seeing the world differently.
Although I have high hopes for all of this, I must confess, I don’t think I’m ever going to learn to like that physical therapist.
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