Starting with my dad, people have been telling me to Stand Up Straight all my life. He told me. The Army told me. My friends told me, and probably a few enemies. No one ever told me how, until last year, when my chiropractor was moved to show me a little exercise in which I stood with my back against a wall, heels pressing against the baseboard, back of my head also pressing against the wall. “When you do that,” he told me, “lift your sternum, and hold it for a count of ten.”
No one had ever told me to lift my sternum, and it took me a few tries to feel what it meant, but it became clear very soon that lifting my sternum was the key to “standing up straight” without the kinds of tension the effort to do that that had always produced – the sucked-in gut, the strained-back shoulders. It didn’t take many days of doing that one exercise to make lifting my sternum effortless, and not many more for it to become an unconscious default. Result: I stand up straighter.
Shortly after this discovery, I happened to be listening to one of the World Series pre-game shows, and heard John Smoltz observe that one of the Houston pitchers was very good “when he was pitching from the inside of his knees.” This caught my attention because it was weird, and I’ve always liked weird. I’d never heard such a phrase before, and I had no idea what it might mean.
So I began to experiment with the idea, trying to discover what walking (at 79 years old, I’m not doing much pitching) from the inside of my knees would feel like. Something Shawn Green wrote helped me: “I had never considered that awareness could reside some place other than the head.” I began to learn how to move my awareness to the insides of my knees while I walked. Nothing fancy required – just a matter of concentrating your attention.
After I learned to do this, I found it made a noticeable difference in the way my feet engaged with the ground. My soles were completely touching down with each step. In the past, they’d been coming into contact with much more weight on their outside edges. I’d been aware of that, on account of it led to annoying pain, but had never figured out a way to correct it. Now, I had, courtesy of John Smoltz.
Not only were my feet connecting more comfortably and efficiently with the ground, but I began to feel the entire motion of walking emanating from my spine, not from my legs. I felt more centered, more in balance than I ever had. The sciatic nerve pain that had been plaguing me diminished or disappeared entirely.
Thinking about what positive effects hearing those two little phrases had led to, I was reminded of a story a friend of mine once told me. She had been raised in Detroit during the 20s, graduating from high school toward the last, dark days of the Depression. She had no hope of going to college without a scholarship, but she had every expectation of receiving that scholarship, since she was at the top of her graduating class. On graduation day, the Speaker read off the list of scholarship recipients, and her name was not among them. Disappointed, she found the best job she could, at which she labored for a few years. One day she ran into a former classmate, home on break from the college she was attending on a scholarship.
“I could never figure out why you didn’t get a scholarship,” she said to my friend.
“I have to admit, I couldn’t, either,” my friend replied.
“Where’d you apply to?”
“Apply?” said my friend.
No one – no principal, no teacher, nobody – had ever told her she needed to apply for a scholarship, so she’d assumed they were just automatically granted to the deserving, and she’d been sure she was one of the deserving. She was one of the smartest people I’ve ever known, but not knowing that one measly little word changed the course of her life.
And that’s my real point, here. You never know what you need to know until you hear it put in the right words, words that ring the bell of understanding in your head. And those words are not the same for everyone. That’s why writers keep writing, or at least why I do. I’m not expecting to say anything new, for God’s sake. Maybe if I were a physicist I could tell people something new about quarks or photons or some other substance I’d dreamed up, but there’s nothing to say about human life on this planet that hasn’t already been said.
On the other hand, nobody’s said it the way I do (or the way you do, or she does, or he does). And I might just say something that rings that little bell for someone, that lets them see or hear or feel something they’d been missing without knowing they were missing it.
When I was 8 or 9 years old, someone or other made a hit record out of an old song from the 1930s called “Three Little Words.” Probably needn’t say that the three little words turned out to be “I love you-ou.” But they could as well be “Lift your sternum,” or “inside your knees,” or “Apply for a damn scholarship.” Well, that last is more than three words, but you get the idea.
