One never thinks about the fluidity of movements during the execution of daily chores and activities – like making breakfast or taking a shower. Due to an unforeseen injury, I find myself on crutches these days. They have been sitting in the closet for a long time after a previous injury. Reviving the basic motor skills to move on flat surfaces around the building and the apartment on those crutches is relatively straight forward. Perhaps with time muscle training effects will make that task physically easier. What I had to realize though is that other tasks are not as easy to complete. When moving around on crutches you can commission your pinky, ring finger and middle finger to carry things – here things that are soft or have a handle. The other two fingers – index finger and thumb are needed to grip the handles of the crutches tightly. So, imagine you want to move a cup of coffee – here filled with coffee – from the kitchen to the coffee table in front of the couch – roughly a 25 feet lateral distance. Normally this action would not even make you pause – fill it – grab it – carry it over to where you want to enjoy it and done. Well established balancing skills get the cup where it needs to be without spilling even a droplet. But clearly this cup cannot be dangling of a finger or two, while swinging the crutches forward. So, it requires a different approach to get the cup from A to B. The first thing that came to mind was a staged approach of moving and resting the cup while I move. I am not sure exactly what my “wingspan” is – my guess is five feet. This means then that I need to plan this coffee transfer carefully. If I cannot find flat surfaces in a +/- five feet radius I may have to first re-arrange some mobile furniture to establish the route. The practical execution looks like this: I position myself between staging area one and staging are two. Then I store the crutches, stabilize myself on one leg and move the cup carefully from one surface to the next. Practically this could extend the journey to more stations if my holding surfaces are not closely aligned to the shortest path between the starting point and the destination. Eventually the cup sits on the coffee table. The joke could be that by the time I make it there the coffee is cold, and I need to move it back to the kitchen for warm up in the microwave and so it goes.
Pretty much everything that needs to be done needs to come with a new logistics approach. It makes you appreciate how broad the skills are, that we master unnoticed daily and how difficult it is to reproduce them when key elements of one’s mobility or tools fall away suddenly.