Not Knowing

This is a hard place to be, the not-knowing. The wondering. It is not a place we humans are used to resting in comfortably. We fight it, resist it, try to outsmart it. Pretend we know where our life is going and where it will take us. But we don't know; we cannot know. We live here all the time, in the uncertainty, in the flux; only seldom are we awake to it. 

Last week I hurt my knee. It made a loud, audible, alarming sound as I ran. Like paper tearing, possibly a pop. I heard it through my headphones. I know what that means, and it can't be good. I walked the last mile along the dusty rail trail back to my car, cursing myself for stupidity and ego, wishing desperately that I could go back, to the moment before my knee snapp when I passed the Kenyan runner with long hair and a longer gait, who I always see out there on the high windblown flats. It seemed a dream, impossible. My knees are strong; they never give me any problem. Within hours, it had swollen fat with fluid, a large angry knee that did not resemble anything that belonged on my body. I didn't cry or panic. I was resolute and weirdly calm, maybe even part of me relieved, though that seems sacrilegious to say out loud.

Relieved, why? Because we think we know our bodies, our lives. We function and thrive on this illusion of control. I can run 14 miles fast today and get up and do it again tomorrow. My body is strong, my knees never any problem. I can run 50 miles or 100K. I can win. The ego required to sustain this illusion can be tiresome, depleting, even as the running builds us up, makes us stronger than we've ever been. Formidable, alive, deeply confident. Beneath the strength is our weakness: pride, ego, a deep assumption that we are strong and always will be. It takes work to carry this everywhere we go. Sometimes we want to put it down, rest a while, remember we are human, afraid, even though this terrifies us, too.

The knee, then, is the wakeup call. A week later, it's almost my knee again. Most of the swelling has subsided, though I am leery of bending it too far, walk with a slight limp, wear a neoprene brace still stained brown from the silt of the Green River, from where we've just returned, floating, drifting, paddling, cocooned in the canyon.

I must wait a week to see the orthopedist, to find out what I've done. In the meantime, I see two PTs in town, both of whom fiddle with my knee, maneuver it into different positions, and cautiously proclaim it free of major damage. At first I am excited, buoyed by their opinions. But my optimism doesn't stick. In my mind I question their credentials. I discredit their expertise. What do they know, I worry to myself, as I reach for the iPad and, with a deep sense of foreboding, type "torn ACL symptoms" into a Google search. For several hours one night before bed, this consumes me. I study knee anatomy diagrams from all angles. Assess the purple ligaments, the red muscles, the blue tendons. Try to figure out which one on my knee is responsible for the dull ache, the stiffness, the feeling that someone has taken a hammer to my kneecap. Of course I can't tell from the pictures what happened to my actual knee. The hot swollen joint that holds me up. That I love and need. That I have lived with all my life. Scarred and mine. I am vexed with uncertainty. I keep Googling. I think I might start to panic. I pick a fight with my husband instead. The night is black and starry, promising another brilliant late-summer day tomorrow, a string of them. But I am house-bound, DQed from the trails. Everything feels wrong.

I want answers. I don't know how to wait, to live in this limbo, to surrender to not knowing for six more days.

But it's what I must do. I am ornery, short tempered, full of shame and self-loathing. The shortest distance between two points is a straight line, but life is a tangled mess and to get to doctor's appointment I must drop into the murk, the fear, swim in it with my children, with Steve. This is deeply uncomfortable. I would like to board a conveyor belt to Wednesday and short cut all the rest but I can't. I must be a mother and a wife, too. First. I must try to be patient and loving and not let the worry take me away from them. Because they are the salve, the healing, if I let them, if I stop pushing away and bring them in, and sit in this kitchen while my six-year-old reads aloud, haltingly, from her book, and try to pay attention and be grateful and think of anything but my knee.

None of us knows anything, really, but this one moment and then the next. How can I have forgotten this already?