Knees and other parts

I dislocated my knee today. This isn't a new thing for me, but it has been a few years since I last did it. It hurts (of course) but worse than that is the frustration of healing the injury. I want to be well now! I feel this particularly keenly at the moment because we're going to a wedding this weekend, and weddings are one of the few chances Robert and I have to dance together. But no dancing on this knee!

At any rate, I was thinking about bodies today, after injuring mine. My friend Madge, over at Be Less Crazy, encourages all of us to appreciate our bodies for how awesome they are, and to count the things they do well for us every day, rather than focusing on our perceived flaws. Like most of us, I tend to take the function of my body for granted, right up until something isn't working! And, as a tall, relatively slender woman, virtually all of the positive feedback I get from the general public about my body is about how it looks, rather than how it functions. And that's how I think about it too, more often than not. For instance, because of my history of dislocating my knees, I have stretch marks on both of them from times when my knee caps have suddenly and violently shot inches away from where they generally hang out. The older I get the more these stretch marks are visible, giving me a kind of fat knee look. Just days ago I was looking in the mirror and sighing (quietly, in my head) about my knees. Or rather, about how my knees look. But knees aren't really for looks, you know?

So today I'm trying, again, to learn to appreciate my function over form. I'll try to remember this when my knees are working perfectly again, bending, stretching and moving easily. I'll love my knees for carrying me around every day, and not sigh at them for bearing some of those scars.