falling in flat shoes

It took me a long time to find a pair of shoes I can walk well in. You will have noticed that feet are not typically shaped like a shoe. Toes do not taper to a point, in fact they do the opposite, they spread to lend us greater stability and flexibility in upright movement. The design of the human foot is amazing, it’s perfectly adapted for walking on both rough and smooth terrain. The designers of the human shoe however seem to be unaware of this. When looking for walking shoes, every pair I tried on had some lumpy bits whichwere there, I was told, to ‘support’ my feet - heel support, ankle support, arch support…and why, oh why do women’s shoes have to have a raised heel? Even Red Band gumboots (don’t get me started)

Anyway, I eventually discovered a pair on converse baseball shoes that provide the least interference with my walk. They are flat with no lumpy bits and there is space for toes. Wonderful. They are however not made for slippery rainy conditions and the soles have little grip. So today, as I walking along the side of the road after being introduced to the delights of Japanese roasted brown rice tea, I stepped onto a wet metal cover plate in the road and my left foot skidded from under me at breakneck speed. Yes, I slipped and fell.

Now at that moment I had not been particularly mindful of my walking but my body reacted with astonishing speed - within a fraction of a second I found myself squatting on my right leg with my arms out to the sides and my left leg extended in front of me. An onlooker would have seen a sudden and spontaneous cossack dance move and then a smooth return to normal walking.

F. M. Alexander, when asked to explain his technique in a few words replied cryptically, “The readiness is all”

If we brace for impact, the impact will hurt. A structure that is able to give will be less likely to break. Children fall often as you may well have observed. Any adult falling in the same way would be much more likely to sustain injury. And that’s not only because our bones become more brittle as we age. If we retrain our mind-body to to release excess tension around the joints, we become resilient, able to weather storms and unexpected changes.

AT is an ongoing search, in each moment and every context, for the Goldilocks Principle: not too much and not too little, but just the right amount of work to do what we are doing. This term was coined by one of my teachers, Robyn Avalon, and I find it is an apt description of what we are learning to find again and again with AT. With practice it finds itself, as it did for me today when my foot slipped on the wet cover plate in the road.