Have you ever felt like you put on the wrong shoes? The kind that pinch and squeeze your feet so tight that you half expect them to reform into some new shape at the end of day, or even after a short while where you have walked longer than you’re pain receptors care to remember. The worst part is you thought it was the right pair of shoes in the beginning and chalked the initial pain up to your imagination and just thought you’d ‘walk it off’ as if the pressure against your toes would eventually magical release because you said it would and the uncomfortable gait you’ve adopted would suddenly just be normal to the rest of your body.
Interesting thought that, or at least to me it is. It kind of makes me think of life, if that makes sense. Just like when you put on those soon-to-be evil shoes, you walk into some choices in your life thinking, ‘yup, this is it’ while the truth of the matter is that it stings slightly and feels just the right amount of uncomfortable that you notice it, but not enough that you do anything about it. Then low and behold as much as you try to ‘walk it off’ things seem to get more and more tender in the soul-spot and suddenly everything is whizzing out of your control as you try to question what the hell it is your doing with your life and where it is exactly you’re going.
Just like those uncomfortable shoes that are reforming the very shape of your foot into a painsicle, you have this choice that has somehow begun to take your innocent young self and reformed and twisted it into something you can’t really recognised as you try to figure yourself out. It’s no wonder people go on journeys to ‘find themselves’ when in fact they grew up knowing who they were. It’s those damn choices that twist and turn things around and make you all confused as you begin questioning what is left and where is right.
Frankly I think we’ve all just been wearing the wrong damn shoes! At least for a little while anyway, we seem to choose to wear these fancy looking, comfort-promising shoes that lie to us with their overall appeal and glitzy outer exterior that has us buying them in the dozens while the real shoes we should be looking for stay hidden in the background, gaining a bit of dust and going out of season as people label them too old fashion or not racy enough to be the right fit.
But seriously, what is it with those shoes? Why do we want to continue wearing them after that first initial wave of pain hits us and the thought of ‘walk it off’ attacks us? I‘ve always thought such things were stupidly obvious. If something hurt, fix it. In this case take them off. In the great grand scheme of things that is life, what then?
Most people would say ‘walk it off’, I’m sure and frankly they wouldn’t be wrong. Sometimes you just have to suck it up. You did, after all choose to wear those shoes so all you can do is endure until the day ends and freedom of the feet becomes a reality. But what if the pain is trying to tell us something, you know, like pain is generally supposed to do. What if it’s trying to tell us it’s the wrong shoes and that maybe we should stop for a moment and take them off before we do some damage? What then?
How is one supposed to know the difference when there exists so many different responses? It confuses me. But I suppose there’s a lesson in when to take those shoes off as well, an important moment that dawns on one as you realize and embrace the pain, readying yourself for the decision to be made. I guess it’s just up to the individual to realize what lesson they get and how long it takes for them to get it.
In the end, I still think it should be simplified though, for the rest of us. How easy things would be then to know, for example, that when those shoes you innocently chose hurt, all one needs to do is to take them off and step back because in the end, it’s not like there are only one pair of shoes out there. Or at least I hope that’s the case.
