My mom loved her old movie camera. This was back in the day when personal movie cameras used film that had to be developed in a lab somewhere. She took it to every family event and would pull it out on a random weekend day just to get scenes of the neighborhood. The scenes would mostly consist of the neighborhood kids involved in one activity or another.

One of the oldest ones that I make a specific appearance in I am about 3 or 4 years old. By specific appearance I mean something I was doing was highlighted by my mothers lens. I am running. I don’t know what for, but she filmed me running across an empty field to a fence.

That’s the me I know. Moving just to move. I have never been measured as hyper active at any point in my life. I sit still well enough. But I love to move. To be active. Stillness holds a vital space in my life but only because the ease with which I move. I spent sometime, after a serious accident, having to measure every step I took and how it was to be done. Every time I wanted to stand, I had to gather my strength and courage to maneuver myself into an upright position.

Before the accident, I would often run, not to get somewhere quickly, but because I love to feel the power in every long stride. I love to feel the synchronization of all the muscles from my feet to my head. And how the internal workings, physical and mental, depended on the occasional burst of speed and energy.

My approach to life has always been, “if I can, I will.” There is nothing beneath my effort. The only things beyond me were the things I couldn’t see myself doing. Like skydiving. Can’t see myself doing that. But I could see myself, at 60 years old, taking a 3 hour hike up to a local mountain peak. No one saw the possibility of that, except me. No one else had to. But it wouldn’t have happened if I didn’t.

Today I can no longer run. The accident has taken my ability to shift all my weight from one foot to the other. Walking alternates the weight distribution, but not with the intensity of running. The pounding force of a full stride run sends quivers through my hip. The pushing off from one leg to the other is lacking anything that resembles synchronicity.

Movement, running in particular, is the path I kept open to my younger self. Running always brought that little girl in the home movie into the present. As long as I could run across the field and reach the fence, she was always going to be a part of me, the vital embodiment of what I can do.

Without the ability to run when I want to where I want, where do I go?