A sore knee, is it me?
Coming to terms with the passing of time.
I’ve had problems with my knees since I was a teenager. It didn’t stop me doing anything, really, but it’s been a constant niggle ever since.
It started with some pain just under my knees, especially when swimming. Subsequently I developed tender swellings at the top of both shin bones. Long story short, I went to a specialist and he said I had something called Osgood-Schlatter disease: a fairly common condition in adolescents where more or less what happened to me happens. I was assured that unless a spur of bone formed in my knee joint, I shouldn’t have any issues and the symptoms should gradually lessen but I’d have the lumps for life.
And this is what happened, almost.
Fast forward many years, during which time I had varying levels of activity from giving up swimming at around fifteen, to doing some sports in university, putting on a lot of weight in my late teens/early twenties, then joining a triathlon club at which point I lost it all again.
During most of that time my knees were fine. I’d get a bit of pain after a long run but that would be mirrored in my feet and hips, so I thought little of it. I met a guy who was a competitive triathlete — he worked in a bike shop and everything — who had the same condition. I remember once him calling it a ‘really rare condition’ (about 10% of kids get it, more in males, more who do sports) and telling me how he was going to get an operation to sort it out because of the pain it caused him. I never really got to the bottom of exactly what it felt like for him as we weren’t exactly close. Anyway, he got the surgery and it apparently helped a lot.
At about the age of twenty-four, I moved away from Bristol and never did tri again. There are clubs around where I live, but honestly, I’d started getting pain in my knees for which I was having to take pain killers before a race, so I kind of decided that I’d tone it down a bit and maybe just run and do the occasional swim.
I remember the first time the current problem raised its ugly head was when I was warming up to do a charity run for a local hospice. The enthusiastic lady who was leading the warm up was having us do really low squats and I felt a twinge in my knee.
Being a man, and an idiot, I shrugged it off, did the run and ended up having this constant dull ache in my knee for weeks.
Over the intervening years I’ve had a few episodes of this, usually after doing something where I bend too low without warming up properly. It doesn’t happen every time. I’m a keen yogi and I have never had a problem practicing this, for example.
Two weeks ago I managed to twinge it while I was at my medieval longsword class (yes it’s as cool as it sounds), and I’m just about getting back to normal now.
I don’t really know if my knee twinging is due to my Osgood-Schlatters or not. What I do know is the older I get, the more often this happens.
Now let me just say, I should and probably will get this looked at by a specialist at some point and will make an informed decision on treatment at that time if something can be done.
But what if something can’t be done?
There’s a temptation toward self pity. Do I simply bemoan my aging body and stop exercising.
There’s also a temptation to keep doing what I’ve always done and hope it doesn’t get any worse.
With both of these options, what I think is happening is that I’m seeing myself as this fixed object in time around which everything is changing. I’m identifying ‘me’ with my body and getting frustrated when my mind and my body are no longer in sync.
What would be truer, however, is that everything is changing, all the time, me included.
Now, I understand that when I talk about ‘me’ in that sense, I’m talking about experience. I’m talking about me as in the mirror that reflects the world.
My issue with the mirror metaphor, however, is that it’s excessively visual. The world, which I’m reflecting, includes all of the sensory information that I am receiving. All the smells, sights, sounds, and yes the pain in my knee.
There are two extreme responses I can have to this pain. As mentioned above.
Or…I could choose a middle path.
This is what I’ve decided to do: Accept that my body is older than it was and maybe I have to slightly adjust what I do, like warming up before and stretching after I exercise (I know boring). But also, to not identify with these changes in my body and let them define ‘me’: the identity who is just the receiving of all of these sensations in order to make decisions based on them. (Yes, I have used the verb ‘receiving’ as a noun here because language as we understand it doesn’t really work for these ideas).
It won’t be easy, and it will take some work, and in the end I may have to go get it looked at, but even if that happens I will still be the me I am in this moment, not who I was before or who I will be in thirty years.
Spring gives way to summer, it doesn’t become it (or should it be autumn to winter?). In the same way, I must give way to my future self and accept that my past self has given way for me.
Life is a series of natural and spontaneous changes. Don’t resist them. That only creates sorrow. Let reality be reality. Let things flow naturally forward in whatever way they like. — Lao Tzu
