I stand on my tiptoes every single day.
Sometimes I tiptoe while standing in the grocery line, sometimes when I walk out of the shower, sometimes as I’m leaving the office after a long day.
I tiptoe during walks long and short, tiptoe walking forward and backward. If I could do a handstand and tiptoe at the same time, I would.
Let me explain:
I’ve never been much on the sentimental fluff of Thanksgiving Day. Give me a plate of turkey and ham and a Dallas Cowboys victory, and I’m good.
I’m not a fan because I try to live mindful and grateful, every day, for having blood circulating throughout my body and synapses still firing in my brain. But, truth? Moments like Thanksgiving Day — no matter how contrived or historically controversial — give us ideal moments amid the usual bustle of life, ugly election cycle and the nation’s new air of uncertainty, to pause and reflect.
Who should care that we’ve made it to another second-to-last Thursday in November while Dreamers are wondering if they’ll be forced out of the only country they’ve ever known, while roughly 20 million Americans await word on what will happen to the health insurance coverage they’ve only been able to secure in the past few years?
Rituals — forwarding emails with Thanksgiving-themed well wishes to friends and associates; plastering on a smile to spend a few days with relatives you aren’t all that comfortable with — always seem silly when set against life’s immediate and harsh realities.
But these times can represent so much more than that. Back to tiptoes:
Tiptoeing is one of the greatest miracles I’ve ever received, the ability to command that my toes stretch as far as they can and support the weight of my entire body. I can hardly imagine the number of muscle fibers and the percentage of my 30 billion neurons involved in carrying the right signals in the right way at the right time through my nervous system into my brain to make that seemingly inconsequential feat possible.
I do this daily as a reminder for the months I didn’t have the ability to. Just a few years ago, I was diagnosed with the extremely rare auto immune disease called CIDP (chronic inflammatory demyelinating polyneuropathy). For reasons my doctors still don’t understand, my white blood cells decided they needed to attack my nerve linings to protect me from a threat that likely wasn’t real.
That led to severe nerve damage, which led to severe muscle atrophy, which made me, a former college football player, physically weaker than my then 9-year-old daughter. Folding a large towel exhausted me. I was in and out of wheelchairs and off and on crutches for a few months.
Even after I began regaining strength and could leave those devices behind, I still couldn’t tiptoe. During my first physical therapy session, the therapist called other therapists over to marvel at my inability to stand on my own toes. I walked like Daffy Duck.
The initial treatment I was given to fight CIDP almost killed me, and hospitalized me for nearly two weeks. From my hospital bed, I told my wife she needed to locate the life insurance policy.
Facing potential death was nothing compared to the inability to stand on my own darn tiptoes, a miracle of movement I had never given a second thought. I could always run fast — before CIDP hit I was a 40-year-old man with the ability to run a mile in less than 7 minutes and had recently completed a 5K in less than 21 minutes — and routinely did 125 push-ups in a set.
After it hit, I was a shell of myself, wondering just who I was, really.
And for reasons I still don’t fully understand, not being able to tiptoe reminded me of the privilege of life like nothing before or since. It’s funny how the more often we consistently receive what we want, the less likely we are to recognize the miracles we’ve been given.
