Thursday, February 2

Day 33: An Idle Mind is the Best Way to Relax

This morning I met with my physical therapist for session number two. I have had a painful, left shoulder and neck for a while now and when my left eye started twitching couple of months and did not cease, I decided enough was enough. Time to take care of it. My doctor recommended a few different Physical Therapy clinics and this one was closest to my apartment so I thought I would give it a try. My therapist is wonderful and the therapy itself is really great. I get acupuncture, a heat pad, massage, back adjustments and today she used a tens unit. For those of you who do not know what that is, “tens” stands for transcutaneous electrical nerve stimulation. Small electrical impulses are sent into your muscles and supposedly it helps them relax by sending a different message to your brain. It actually works very well. She set me up on a massage table face down and once the needles, tens unit and heating pad were in place she left the room for a while. Ah. A little extra sleep coming my way.

Or not. Once I had been lying there a few minutes, the heat from my face activated the perfume left by the last person on the face pad. Fabulous. It just so happens that I am highly sensitive to smells and the smallest unpleasant odor can trigger a migraine. I tried to move my face around to see if that would help but I only managed to get my hair in my face. I moved my hair and tried to relax and concentrate on the scent of peppermint. Then the door opened and my therapist came back in the room. She asked how I was doing and I explained the leftover perfume etc. and she removed the face pad and the smell was magically gone. She could only smell the scent of the plastic material the face pad was made of. Lucky for her.

After that I was able to really relax, which brings me to today’s title. A school teacher gave her first grade students a list of proverbs that were incomplete and asked them to complete them in their own words. One student wrote the proverb above. I think it is absolutely fantastic. It suggests that a person do the exact opposite of what the original proverb suggests, which is that an idle mind causes a person to do/think bad things. I read this child’s proverb after my PT session during my commute to work and I chuckled to myself. Before the perfumy face pad was taken away all I could think about was the smell and how I would probably get a headache soon. Once it was taken away, my mind became idle and I did in deed relax. The wisdom of children should definitely not be underestimated. Unfortunately I did end up with a headache but that is what Tylenol is for.

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