What’s weird, is this feeling happened today, as I was working and looking out at the trees in the neighbors yard. “What is it about birch leaves and their ability to rotate and oscillate back and forth so quickly without breaking at their stems? Why don’t I know more about this!?” Is a moment when I step back and have to think about where I am in this world.
In most of our busy lives, it’s hard to always stop and notice all the folks involved with helping us throughout the day. You don’t always think about each and every individual involved with all the pieces and processes that make up the world we all live in. It’s hard to always think like that.
From my rehab and the wheelchair, you see the world differently. Not just lower — but slower, wider, more stationary and from a perspective that only happens when your life is changed completely before your own eyes. Astronauts talk about the overview effect: the cognitive shift that happens when you see Earth from space and then grasp it suddenly as a whole. Astronauts go up for this perspective, and I’ve been having that experience from going down and back to the beginning of movement.
I first touched on this idea in The Astronaut On Earth — this is the deeper dive into this topic.
Thoughts From Life – Pre-Accident
It’s weird, having to have had such an abrupt and life altering event happen to you right when things were looking up for me. I was getting into my groove of life, and finding ‘what works’.
I was running and biking every day, running a project at my job with a ton of mechanical complexity, and I was enjoying life. I had more recently met someone who I really liked and enjoyed spending time with as well! It was a time in my life where I was able to focus on the areas of life I really wanted to focus in on.
Having such a capable body and mind, I felt like I could tackle just about any project that came across my way. I was handy, fixing just about anything I could on my truck, house, and helping neighbors nearby. I liked helping people! I never thought about it before, it was just something I liked to do. If someone needed help moving something and they needed a friend with a truck, I liked to be that person. Help the neighbor carry a piece of exercise equipment to their upstairs apartment? Yep. Help my friends move to their new house? Definitely.
I was very fortunate. After graduating college, going from college broke, living off hot water and cigarettes, to a big boy job, it felt like I could do so much. It was a really nice change from how hard and long I had to work, before I graduated. I liked staying busy, and being handy helped.
It was also a very fortunate to be able to have taken a step back from all the responsibilities I previously had to manage. This time, it was me and my dog. We did everything together. He worked on the truck with me, we’d go for runs, bike rides, truck rides and camping trips. We were fortunate we didn’t have to worry about too much else. That’s honestly a very fortunate position to be in. I don’t think I ever truly or fully appreciated that.
Thoughts from the Present
Just this morning, I woke up tingly, headache, and a gut full of sorrows. I was constipated because I didn’t eat any fiber from the day before. I didn’t have a lot of movement the day prior outside of the wheelchair. Trying to exist in the world while also maintaining a recovery on an ever growing and healing nervous system is very challenging! The two are sometimes at odds.
These cause each day so many curve balls, when even a slip up on a meal can sometimes wreak havoc on my body. Seeing the daily struggles I have to compete with if I slip up on some of the most basic human needs really puts “having it good” into perspective. It ain’t so easy out there for so many folks. Our own bodies can sometimes be prisons, and there is no escape from yourself.
I’ve also been able to track my bodies observations with my writing. This has been one of the most unexpected series of events from my Recovery that I didn’t see coming. There are changes happening almost right before my own eyes! I will re-read my notes from last week, and I notice that the initial observations of a muscle group twitching or ‘waking up’ as I like to call it, are now staying in place and able to volitionally contract! It’s slow progress, but it’s really happening! I don’t know why or how except just being consistent, but I figure I better keep on it, even if it’s slow.
Seeing the awe of what the body is capable of doing, really is amazing to have been witnessing first hand. When you think about it, a lot of what doctors are doing is getting rid of the bad, and helping secure what’s already in us. My back surgery was fixing a mangled spine. The real healing is done slow and steady, by none other than our own bodies. That’s quite the miracle, if you ask me. We have made it quite far helping keep people alive in hospital settings, and then we can help facilitate the healing and growth that our bodies are so amazingly capable of.
I honestly think a lot about the ‘innerdependence’ we all truly have with one another. The idea that we as individuals are all contributing to something larger than ourselves. I have received help from so many individuals. My mother and father, family, wife. All of the care team and experts in the clinic and hospital settings now spread out over these past couple years. It’s remarkable. The number starts to head into the Hundreds. This is simultaneously a feeling of being so small, yet so connected at the same time. Without our community and people around us, life would not exist like we all live today.
“We’re all fighting our own battles” – noticing and see everyone in PT and the outside world fighting. Struggling. Working on what they all are doing, but not getting attention or credit for it. We’re all struggling and working on something, others might just not know it yet.
When I’m working on my sit to stands, and look around the Clinic, you see so many other faces. The ones that are in my situation, or worse, regaining function, working on maintaining what they have, or just getting help with any and all types of physical abilities, or folks that are there because of something from birth, working on building as much as they can. The clinicians, helping us every step of the way. The students, helping and assisting in every way they can. Turns out, we are all a lot more connected than we might all seem, sometimes.
I’ve been working on regaining bodily function, one day at a time! Starting with my upper body, core, and legs! Working with my crawling, KAFO braces, Exoskeleton, I’m working my body and giving him so much information! Just slowly but surely trying every day to keep up the daily input that our bodies crave and need! I’ve been fortunate to have been able to be continually working on my body. It hasn’t been easy to manage, having to maintain a full time job just to pay for physical therapy, but my body needs it. He gets so tight and feels so awful after long days without movement.
Observations Inside My Body
What’s been one of the most interesting aspects of this journey is witnessing all the changes inside my own body. The changes to my healing nervous system, muscle growth, sensation, re-activation of my muscles waking up, you name it! I feel like a conscious infant, having to experience infancy again, in an adult body. What’s been so interesting is how my experience of this effect has been so very active. Astronauts have a different experience because it’s very much external. My experience is very internal, this inversion makes this phenomenon so interesting because I have had such a hard time describing it, and this has been one of the closest ideas I’ve come across that best described it.
It’s almost like I’m running a real time, internal experiment on myself. Testing out how different inputs respond to my recovering body, and all the different connections that are truly there in our bodies, that we might not yet have fully described.
Learning about the physiology of our body, the kinematics and kinetics of our body, has helped me grow and expand my own recovery. This has allowed me to better communicate my experience to my PTs and OTs, and care team, to better describe all the sensations and changes in living with in real time.
What’s crazy, is how passive the Overview Effect could be for an astronaut. In space, it’s essentially what happens to you. Here on Earth in my situation, the effect is from inside me, I am observing and making these observations from inside my own body which is undergoing such a significant change! It’s almost the complete opposite, and for that I’m in awe a lot of the times. Such a peculiar sensation to have to lay witness to, inside your own self!
Observations of Familial Growth
Right now, as we all get ready for the next working day, I’ve been witnessing almost an exponential growth in the family that I am apart of and were raised in! All my siblings are having children, they’re growing, and getting older with each passing day! It’s honestly a crazy phenomena, seeing the children growing up before my eyes. It’s startling how quick it all happens! But so graciously exciting too, to have seen where they all came from. It’s honestly quite the sight!
What’s also been a very interesting aspect of my daily life, is how I am in constant or near constant communication with some member of my family! My folks, siblings, you name em, I’m trying to talk with them! We speak on the phone any given day, and it helps me so much. Almost like how an astronaut is keeping in touch with Houston, the Mission Control center, it also feels kinda similar to that as well!
They are a huge support group and I need them so very much. They’re very important to me, it’s just so hard to be so far away sometimes. That’s such a difficult aspect, but I must persist and move on each day!
Observations of Current Events
Noticing the dissonance in the world, while I have had to focus so much on my body, almost removed and also sheltered from society, has allowed me to see both the love I receive, and sometimes the hate produced from around the world because of so much comparison, greed, and lust for having more. There’s really a lot of events taking place throughout the world, and it’s difficult for us all to be so removed from it all. As I’m slowly reintegrating with society, this perspective has shown me how valuable our sense of self, as an individual, can be for us as a whole. We need that, each and every one of us.
When you think about our innerdependence, and the might that is the human race, it really begins to show how amazing we all can be, when we work together with one another. We build bridges, ships, rockets to outer space! None of that would even be fathomable without the teams of amazing folks we have working together for something larger than ourselves. We’re better together than on our own, and all the accomplishments, feats, structures, and vehicles to travel the universe are all examples of just that. It’s not feasible, but so much more difficult to try to work through everything on one’s own abilities. Learning and working together is one of the greatest feats as a human we can all work to strive to do!
Thinking about that Birch tree again, you begin to realize, it isn’t just us. It’s not just me seeing this Birch Tree. We’re all in this, this beautiful, messed up, intricate web that is life as we know it. When you stop to realize the full splendor and the beauty of the Earth, you can even see it in the simple rattle of a birch leaf.
Works Cited
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overview_effect
- Yoder, Kate (February 9, 2022). “The Overview Effect / How the view from space might be key to saving the planet”. Grist. Archived from the original on February 10, 2022.
- Stepanova, Ekaterina R.; Quesnel, Denise; Riecke, Bernhard E. (May 22, 2019). “Understanding AWE: Can a Virtual Journey, Inspired by the Overview Effect, Lead to an Increased Sense of Interconnectedness?”. Frontiers in Digital Humanities. 6 9. Frontiers Media. doi:10.3389/fdigh.2019.00009.
- Yaden, David B.; Iwry, Jonathan; Slack, Kelley J.; Eichstaedt, Johannes C.; Zhao, Yukun; Vaillant, George E.; Newberg, Andrew B. (2016). “The overview effect: Awe and self-transcendent experience in space flight”. Psychology of Consciousness: Theory, Research, and Practice. 3 (1): 1–11. doi:10.1037/cns0000086. ISSN 2326-5531.
- Gallagher, S., Janz, B., Reinerman, L., Trempler, J., and Bockelman, P. (2015). A Neurophenomenology of Awe and Wonder: Towards a Non-reductionist Cognitive Science. London: Springer.
The Astronaut on Earth 
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