A different kind of goal

or, learning not to reach

On July 29th, I had a partial knee replacement.¹ For the first three weeks after surgery, I did very little except three daily short walks, prescribed exercises, icing the knee, and lots of sitting in a reclining chair or on the couch with my knee above my heart. My family was stunned. They—along with numerous friends, apparently—had expected me to be trying to limp through a run mere days after the surgery, only to wreck my healing. They had expected to have to argue and plead with me not to be a moron.

I was not a moron.

I was compliant. I obeyed what the surgeon, his Physician’s Assistant, the in-home physical therapist, and my orthopedic-surgeon friend all said to do (or not do). Ice, sit, walk, do (very easy) exercises. Rinse and repeat.

How could this be? I confess that I, too, am a little bit surprised by my complete lack of impatience or frustration. When kindly friends said empathically, ‘oh, you must be so frustrated not to be able to do things’, I could only say, with mild bemusement, ‘actually, I’m not’.

Of course, I’ve given this quite a bit of thought. And I’ve realized that I can tolerate the relative inactivity of my recovery because I’m still pursuing a goal. But it’s a very different kind of goal than I’m used to in sports. It’s a push, not a reach.

In my athletic pursuits, I always like to have a goal, a race or event to aim for, something that gives shape to the near-daily exercise I like to do. Last year at around this time, I was getting ready for the Head of the Charles. Before that, all spring and summer long, I’d been training for a 33km mountain running event in Greece. Leading up to each of those events, all my workouts were steps bringing me closer to the goals I aimed to reach.

Reach. That’s the key word. When you choose a race, you set it in your mental and literal calendar, and then you toss a grappling hook out into the future to grab it. Every training session you do to prepare you for that goal requires you to tug yourself up that rope little by little until you’ve reached the hook. Your every day is determined by that goal outside of you, ahead of you, above you, at the other end of the imaginary rope.

Photo by holyck photography on Unsplash

What I’m doing now involves pushing. There’s no specific date I’m aiming for. There’s no goal beyond full recovery of the joint (which isn’t in doubt, so it hardly counts as a goal at all). It will happen when it happens. In due course, there will be a point when I can bend my left knee the same amount I can bend my right. Until I reach that point, I simply aim for a little bit more each day—a bit more strength in my admittedly atrophied leg muscles, a bit more range of motion, a bit less swelling, a bit less residual nerve weirdness. Rather than strain at something outside of me, I’m just nudging my own self forward a little bit at a time.

The pushing kind of goal feels apt for the creative side of life. It seems to me that the enemy of success at writing or revising a novel (substitute here any other kind of creative project) is the imposition of an external goal that you must then strain towards. Granted, sometimes we have no choice: editors impose deadlines. But for the most part, for most of the vast number of writers out there, we work on our own schedule, our own timeline—our own establishment of goals.

It’s important, it seems to me, to embrace the pushing kind of goal, and not the reach. Sometimes it’s helpful to set expectations for ourselves—a certain or weekly word count. Motivation and momentum are at play here, after all, and the external arbiter (real or imagined) can be decisive in simply getting us to put the butt in the chair and get the words on the page. Still, I think those sorts of goals are best set at a pretty low level. Maybe 500 words a day is better for us than 2,000. If we think of 500 words as the bite we must chew, it’s easier. It’s closer, in fact, to a pushing goal that’s internal to ourselves. It’s something we can nudge along, little by little, rather than feel we must make big, grand, all-consuming grasps.

Ticking it along. This was a phrase a rowing coach said to me during a lesson probably twenty years ago, and it has stuck in my mind. That coach likened the rower’s propulsion of a rowing shell to a person kicking the wheel of a potter’s wheel (the human-powered kind). If you set your foot down hard, you’d stop the wheel before you gave it the push to get it going fast again. If you set your foot down gently, you’d just keep the wheel going steadily. Ticking it along.

Photo by Courtney Cook on Unsplash

So, too, with writing. “Ticking it along” has become the phrase I use to describe my work on something new. I’m just ticking it along, to see where it will go.

And so, too, with recovery from surgery. The outcome for both the book and the knee is the same: the book will be finished; the knee will recover. If I strain to grasp at a distant goal, I might impede my own progress. If I stay within myself and nudge forward, a little bit at a time, I’ll get there.

I don’t recommend knee surgery, sure. But I do recommend the pause it has imposed, and the kind of thinking it has brought out into the open. It’s a good reminder that we already possess our goals.

1.

For those of you tallying up a list of your friends and acquaintances who have been having various joints replaced, let me just say that it looks like a partial is far less challenging a surgery than a full replacement. It’s far less than half.