On Getting Better

I've been thinking about a lot of things. If you know me well you know that I have a penchant for speaking through parables. So as I'm thinking through the change that's going on in my life personally and professionally, thinking about current events in Baltimore, thinking about change in libraries and in the profession, all that comes to mind is my Tuesday acupuncture session. So I'll just tell my parable and let you take from it what you will.

I love acupuncture, it's my favorite kind of magic: old magic that works REAL GOOD. Most of the time when I get acupuncture, we're working on a realignment, a little course correction, and it feels good. If you've known acupuncture, you've known the zen space that it creates. Time for a little deep breathing, a little visualization, just sorting things out. You leave that appointment feeling fantastic, and you feel better and better after the treatment. Getting better is fun and easy it's magic with no cost. Okay a little cost, but not too much really. That's how it works, right? That's how it should be?

This week, though, what happened at acupuncture was this: what we found was an old issue that was possibly the cause of a bunch of other stuff. So we went to work on it. I did not get 20 minutes of meditative visualization. There was twenty minutes of pain and suffering. Incoherent moaning even. It just hurt. The whole time. A lot.

In fact, it still hurts. The the exercises that I am supposed to be doing, they also hurt. My shoulder? it hurts. It'll probably hurt when I go back next week. Because it wasn't working right. I didn't hurt when it wasn't working right. But it hurts now. And it's gonna keep hurting for a while.

I guess I could ignore it and hope it goes back to mostly not hurting and not working right. We could do that. But I won't, and we shouldn't.

I want to get better and I want us to get better and I want to believe we want to be better.

Sometimes it hurts.