Catching Balls

Renae, my trainer/coach/mentor-in-movment, is teaching me qigong, as I've told you.  Yesterday, she brought a little crocheted  ball and asked me to toss it from one hand to another, then in arches.

Balls scare me, always have, ever since 8th grade P.E.  We called it P.E. but nobody ever taught us anything.  The teachers sat smoking under the trees and we divided up into teams and played softball.  Or maybe it was baseball.  The teachers were taking their break so we girls went through the motions on our own.  If by chance your bat connected with the mean ball, you'd  run to first base--although I don't recall ever getting that far.

"Divide up teams," one of the teachers said before taking her place under the trees, and we did.   Betty and I were bookish, introspective girls who'd probably never actually held a ball of any kind in our hands before 8th grade.  We stood together, last two to be chosen, feeling like the miserable undesirables we were.

My 8th grade self, still in there, quivers at the sight of a ball intended for me to catch--so when Renae extended the exercise to throwing the ball back and forth from her to me, I felt panic. I could still hear Cheryl Bullard shouting, "Linda Harris, can't you ever catch the ball?"

First, Renae stood close to me and I caught it most every time.  Then we moved further apart, and I missed it only twice.  She showed me how to pick up a dropped ball by putting one foot close to the ball and bending the other leg slightly.  (My previous way was to cringe, apologize profusely, and awkwardly sprawl every-which-way to pick up the damned errant ball!)

I didn't tell Renae about 8th grade baseball trauma, but I half-expected her to banish me from qigong hour for my pathetic catching and throwing skills.

When she asked me to take off my glasses and she took off hers, we continued throwing back and forth, and I threw and caught even better.  "Good!" she said--smiling encouragingly, to my disbelief and happiness.

All these years I've held on to Cheryl Bullard's assessment of my athletic ability, ducking inside to wash dishes or water the plants (anything!) if someone suggested a game of ping pong or anything else involving a ball.

"Without your glasses, your eyes see the bigger picture," Renae said, "without focusing on details."  Glasses train us to look in certain directions and see only what we can see through that portion of the lenses.  She said it's good to exercise the eye muscles from time to time and wear the glasses only when we really need them.  Doing that improves our balance and can actually prevent tripping so easily.

Walking out of the gym, all puffed up from my good catching and throwing, I realized I'd been wearing my 8th grade lenses  too long--the ones in which Cheryl and the other self-proclaimed athletes of softball hour were enlarged to gargantuan proportions!

Maybe I'll invite some friends over for a game of crocheted-ball-throwing sometime.  Maybe someone will say, "Wow, Linda Harris, you are an amazing ball catcher!"