Ergonimically Challenged (and rescued)

2010 has rushed its way in, with client project after project taking me (often virtually, sometimes in person) to Singapore, Basingstoke, Boston, and myriad sites nearby to learn, and then to write about, the widest range of topics.

There's only one small problem with this blessing of work and that is this: I cannot sit at my computer. Or, I could no longer sit here for more than five minutes at a spell by the time yesterday rolled around (hence my typos of late! forgive me!). I had this funny little problem, all through December, of barely any feeling up and down my entire right side, except for when some feeling returned and that feeling was fire. I thought I could think this little problem away. Turns out, I failed at that.

But I'm not here to complain. I'm here to celebrate a woman named Betsy, who moved her schedule around yesterday to see me and—muscle by muscle, nerve by nerve—explained what my body was doing (or refusing to do). When she described my case as both acute and chronic, I smiled. My body like my life, I thought.

There's a path out, and I'm going to take it, though things like this take awhile. What matters most to me is that there are people like Betsy—informed and good, professional and kindly, who stop when you need them and ease away the ache without chastising you for being such a poor steward of your own muscles and nerves to begin with.

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Bright Lights

In Wayne, PA, you either look for stories or trust that stories will find you.

Yesterday, while yielding my often ill-behaving hair to the tres-talented MacKenzie of the always -superior Cole Wellness Spa (which sits directly in the square heart of Wayne), a certain Sean Guiney walked in. "He looks like Sting, don't you think?" MacKenzie said, and when I cocked my head slightly to the left, the guy kind of did.

Soon we were joined by Liz, the receptionist, and soon stories were flying, and soon Sean was talking about this organization that he founded in April 2009, Kids and Hope Foundation, Inc. He was talking, in particular, about the families who—no longer willing to live in their cars—have taken up residency among the tall trees and wild wolves and myriad deer of New Jersey's Pine Barrens. Without running water or electricity they live. Within the plastic walls of tents. Sending their children to school, or waiting for children to be born, and hoping, most of all, for a way out.

The rain comes down, the snow falls, there are floods, there is a freeze, there is the thick dark of long nights, there is a fiesty dog keeping the wolves at bay—and this, to many families, is home. Sean Guiney, a former auto mechanic, is doing all he can to raise $30,000 a year to help those in that needy place with everything from food and school supplies to the possibility of affordable housing.

That was some story—a story that left me thinking about gifts and Christmastime.

Just a week or so earlier, I'd encountered another story in Wayne. This time I was in a boutique buying a bracelet for a friend when Sharon McGinley looked at me and said, "Beth Kephart, right? Radnor High School?" Yes, I agreed, and she reintroduced herself—a former classmate who had, as it turned out, spent some time getting to know those now too old for foster care, but unprepared for life. "I heard the stories," she told me, "about those who needed bridging between childhood and adulthood, and about all of those who fell through the cracks. It seemed like something had to be done, and so I decided to try to do it." Eddie's House: Doorway to Adulthood is the pretty amazing result.

It's a bleak day here. I've been up since shortly after midnight, working. The rain is gray and the earth is brown, and no one I know wants to be outside. But there are many out in this weather today who don't have choices like I do. There are also, thankfully, those who have decided to assert themselves against the status quo.

This blog post is for them.

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The Person I am Becoming

Maybe change is harder for me than it is for others, and maybe I've not taken risks—have not traveled on my own throughout, say, Morocco; have not sung for my living in subway stations; have not acted on behalf of tomorrow without first shoring up today. I run, I push, I fight, I dream, but there's framework about me, and ground.

Yesterday I decided to have my hair cut in a new way—to give up twenty-five years of looking essentially the same for a shot at looking like the person I suspect I have become. I decided to change something that doesn't much matter but also matters hugely, just to prove to myself that I can. I sat in the chair of a girl named MacKenzie (an artist, I'd been told; a girl with ideas). I said, "Tell me what you would do."

She studied me. She spoke some truths. She began to tell me her story.

I was there for two hours, maybe more. I sat in her chair on a rainy day while she worked out the texture of my hair, named the shape of my face, described my head as flat, then laughed. "Don't worry," she said. "That's nothing. I've got a hole in mine." Then she cut and blew the hair dry. "Looks good," I said. She said, "I'm not even half done." She cut some more, she stood back, she cut, she blew it dry. The others in the salon stopped by.

Finally MacKenzie held up a mirror and I stood and I looked, and I might have cried, for what she had done was so good and so right. Cried for the good of this small act of letting go, of trusting someone else with me, of trusting myself to be less afraid to emerge as the person I am yet and yet becoming.

I have less hair. My head is lighter. I will wear Magda's coat and walk with my shoulders back, my green eyes high.

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