A thought occurred to me very first thing yesterday morning, as I was still half asleep in bed…that love of movement is tantamount to love of life. You can’t really have one without the other because to be alive is to be dynamic…a state that is “characterised by constant change, activity, or progress”. I am certainly like that in my head…its what makes it so very hard for me to stop thinking, probing, dot-joining, extrapolating, always looking for solutions, my head is a little dynamo…but its equally important that I be like that in my body, otherwise my health quickly implodes (I think we are all made that way, to be honest). I can so clearly see now that, at times when physical movement has become less dynamic than my mental movement, I have really floundered in both my morale and ultimately my health and, lately, I have been a lot like that (I also end up looking for more and more mental “stims” to try fill the gap…but they never will). A need for more movement is now brimming over in me, I’m literally raring to go.

Ironic, really, that this feeling should come up in me now as I currently have covid! Those of you following this blog will know that we were due to move house last week…and we did…but on the very day we moved, I tested positive with covid, having had a suspiciously severe “cold” for a few days, so we did the whole moving process, from A to B for two nights then B to C, involving dropping stuff at our storage unit, picking other stuff up and moving it two flights of stairs into our new rental apartment then unpacking. It was a case of “needs must” as my husband couldn’t have done it alone, but it was a tough ask for me, physically compromised as I normally am, let alone with all this extra demand and the viral load onboard, meaning every fibre of my body felt absolutely awful, and still does to be fair. Thankfully, my husband is still testing negative after all these days so at least one of us is fully functioning and I can tell I am starting to improve a little each day.

The reason this random thought about movement came to me, I presume, was that I was waking up for the first time in the apartment that is now our new home until we complete on our house purchase (which may not be too far out of reach at last, after some good news yesterday). This apartment is roomy, light, warm, comfortable and with magnificent views over the city of my birth because, although this isn’t where we are buying our forever house, I decided to come home for the festive season, close to family, familiarity and all the amenities we could possibly need in walking distance. Its been a lot of years since I felt this grounded and homely at Christmas, not having spent this time of year here since just before my mother died, almost 30 years ago, so I guess this is all part of the feel-good factor that has been washing through me since  we arrived here, in spite of my viral load. However, a huge part of it is just how contrasting this place is with where we have been staying for four months which (at the risk of repeating myself from previous posts) was desperately dark, damp and pokey inside. In there, there wasn’t enough room to swing a cat!

So it’s occurred to me just how important space is in my living environment; it really makes all the difference. I was fortunate enough to have a huge living room in my old house and there was plenty of room to move around between all the different rooms, being a modern house; it was never that word I just used, “pokey”, even when the whole family was home. Some of the places we have considered for buying have been though, as is often the case with older properties (knees-up-to-the -fireplace rooms and narrow passageways and stairs are par for the course when it comes of cottages in villages, which is where we have been looking). If there is one theme that has surfaced over the last year its that I have consistently preferred less pristine houses with more space and potential  for improvement to more pristine properties which, once we moved in, would render us very tightly packed in some tiny spaces for the rest of our days…the whole thought of which filled me with abject horror, not least because of our experiences with the rental property we were living in these past months. Thankfully, the house we are buying has some really good spaces including a huge main living room with light coming from three directions, which I know is pretty much what sold it to me!

Plenty of daylight is its own factor for me as, without it, my serotonin quickly tanks and pain levels swiftly increase (another problem with where we were before….) but having enough space to move about in is also a huge factor because I am noticing, now that I am back in a decent space, just how much I actually move about in the average day, yes even when ill with covid. There’s nothing like losing something, even temporarily, to make you really appreciate it and want to get it back!

The thing is I do have chronic pain, I do have limits to my stamina , so I can’t be outside rambling all day or doing sport, especially at this time of the year…therefore the number of steps I happen to do just moving around my house is really important to me (in my old house, I tracked that I averaged well over 10,000 steps per day just moving from room to room and up and down stairs, especially when I was busy preparing the house to sell it). Having the space to spontaneously swing my arms, to bend, to stretch, to lunge is also important. It was only when I completely lacked such space, in our previous rental, that I came to appreciate just how important those things are to my health and wellbeing. There wasn’t even room there to lay down my yoga mat and do anything that involved putting my arms out to the sides for a side twist, such were its limits, nor was there anywhere I could continue my longstanding daily dance practice apart from up and down the narrow corridor between bedrooms. Back in my old house, we kept one room free of furniture expressly for these reasons and the new place will have its own yoga and dance space in the spare room but its not just about that but having enough space to move about, properly in the living room, the kitchen, the bedroom, anywhere I happen to be, that I’ve really missed…and have back again, now we are here in this spacious converted “grand” Victorian house where large scale was the order of the day when they built it. I can’t tell you just how wonderful this feels to me, in contrast with where we were a week ago!

The interesting thing about feeling so lousy with covid is that it’s made me long for a time when I can move my body again. Even as I sit here with every muscle outlined in pain, that very hyper-awareness of all the different muscle groups that go to make up my body makes me yearn for the moment when I can shake it off and get back to my old routines of yoga and dance. In fact, I have already had my yoga mat down on the floor twice since we got here and have managed a semblance of my old routine, which felt so good, just to stretch out my poor body and hold it for a few moments.

I’m also noticing the importance of this factor of movement to overall wellbeing because of a certain spontaneity of movement that immediately came back to me (that had been missing for months…) the very first evening we were in the new place. There I was, waiting for the kettle, when I happened to notice my reflection in the window and saw how I was standing in an impromptu tree posture then a side stretch to give my hips a gentle release…I normally do this kind of thing all the time and it helps to keep me limber, but I completely ceased doing it in the last place (I really don’t know what it was with that place but neither of us had any willpower to exercise there, not even my yoga obsessed husband; is it because we were so depressed?).

These little things I like to do, like grab a wrist behind my back and pull, roll out my spine, take a stroll across a room, for the sake of some small thing I could have picked up on the last trip, all add up; they keep me supple throughout the day, they also remind me where my muscles are “in space” so that I remain in touch with my proprioceptive equipment (which, being autistic, can be a bit compromised at times…), keeping clumsiness at bay and helping me to get better at being upright without my autonomic system always spinning off into a panic about gravity, dumping blood to my feet because my heart has started racing. When I forget to move, or for other reasons find it too hard to move, these taken-for-granted functions go awry pretty quickly and my health starts to suffer. My body quickly deconditions through lack of use and I also lose the joy of my body pretty quickly because I tend to detach from it (remember, I’m autistic so its a case of “out of sight, out of mind” once I even forget I have a body). I desperately need to get back in touch with it again!

All of this has helped me realise how movement isn’t just a good habit, something we tick off a list of good things to do each day. It’s an ongoing relationship, a kind of  self expression, an impulse that is up there with breathing, a fundamental longing and even a kind of spiritual need without which we quickly lose touch with the gift of having a body and all the wonder and appreciation that keeps it functioning properly. We all know how under-appreciation will undermine the performance of anything, given time!

When the desire for movement is strong we can be sure that our life force is strong. The converse also applies: so, when the most compelling impulse is to stagnate, our life force is probably floundering or certainly not at its best. So I’m very happy to report that mine is extremely strong, in spite of having covid, which gives me the best possible odds of recovering well from it.

I recently watched a video on Facebook that made me laugh out loud as it was a grown man performing a load of movements, fidgets and little experiments with his own body or various impromptu “stim” toys, such as elastic bands and sharp objects, that we all used to do as kids before the advent of social media. It made me laugh not only because I could clearly recall these things being how I spent much of my own childhood but because I could still relate so strongly to many of them now. I am the “kid” who is still so curious about experiencing different sensations and finding out what my body can do and who (when no one is watching) am still prone to bending my hypermobile limbs in curious shapes, tapping out rhythms using all my fingers and toes at once while making clicking noises with my tongue, attaching pen lids to my fingertips or flicking hairbands around the room, pushing my hands against the worksurface and boinging up and down, walking along all the lines of the floor tiles or sticking the drinking bottle on the end of my tongue and waggling it about. In other words, I stim-fidget all the time, or at least I do when I’m feeling OK, compared to when I’m not…which you can always tell because I tend to freeze, to seize up, to stagnate. Having these urges back is synonymous with the return of my joie de vive, my gumption, my determination and my unstoppable life force!

And whilst my body has certainly taken a hit from the lack of yoga and dance these few months, rather than worry about or lament all the momentum I lost, I intend to focus on getting back to my happy movement habits, starting from today!

So if a desire for movement is low in you, as it has certainly been in me for a little while, rather than try to force some sort of movement practice whilst knowing you don’t really want to do it, I wonder if its maybe time to ask what this says about how you are feeling about your life situation and whether there is anything you could do to improve this. Sometimes, the answer is something extremely simple such as decluttering or sometimes the thing that occurs to you might only be the first step of a much longer journey towards achieving different circumstances (like the decision I made, two years ago, to relocate and change the way we were living) but it’s still an important one to face up to, however hard the prospect of changes up ahead may be, especially if there’s a chance that it might encourage you to get some movement back into your life again (sitting there doing nothing is so often a fear response of surrendering to something you don’t want anymore but are trying to put up with).

Out there somewhere is a life that will make you want to have more vigour in your movements again and this will help to refuel your essential life force. Without your life force, you effectively have nothing at all since you lack the conviction, the passion or the willpower to fuel any attempts at achieving, say, lasting health…you are simply going through the motions but nothing will ever stick for long. However, with the vitality that movement brings, a love of life can start to reignite and that can often be the missing ingredient to fuel anything you can set your mind to!