Towards Feeling Normal Again
A reflection on endurance, historical pain, and the long work of recovery.
Deep Life Reflections | Essay 45 | James Gibb
Recovery is not a return to who we were. Instead, it is the steady, careful work of learning how to move forward changed.
“The oak fought the wind and was broken, the willow bent when it must and survived.”
—Robert Jordan, The Fires of Heaven
Today I began cardiac rehab.
After open-heart surgery, it feels good to put on a t-shirt, shorts, and trainers. Nick, my cardiac physiotherapist, told me his job was to get me “feeling normal again.” Normal is very far from how I’ve been feeling since the surgery five weeks ago. So those words felt very good.
My recovery is not going to be a dramatic leap back into life, but a series of calibrated and careful steps. There are also things I used to be able to do that I cannot do yet.
The ultra runner Scott Jurek knows something about the tyranny and the promise of the next step. I just finished his book, North: Finding My Way While Running the Appalachian Trail. Co-written with his wife, Jenny, it’s his vivid account of a gruelling journey along the 2,197-mile Appalachian Trail, which stretches from Georgia to Maine.
Proposed in 1921 and completed in 1937, the trail, which cuts through 14 states with over 400,000 feet of elevation change, is hiked by more than three million people each year. In July 2015, world-class ultramarathon runner Scott Jurek attempted to break the speed record for running the Appalachian Trail. Over 47 days, Jurek ran, hiked, climbed, and stumbled nearly fifty miles northward each day, battling both the terrain and his own physical and mental limits.
Early in his attempt, Jurek faced a major physical setback—a blown-out right knee and a torn left quad muscle. Over several chapters, we are right there with Jurek, sharing in his pain, despair, and the looming spectre of failure. The attempt seems over after barely a week. But Jurek has an extraordinarily tough mindset. Not only does he continue, he recovers.
The Appalachian Trail itself is a character in this story, with its rugged beauty and brutal challenges. It presents a constantly changing backdrop, from golden vistas at sunset to sheets of freezing wind and rain.
Jurek emerges as a highly likeable and approachable fellow, happy to chat and take photos with fellow hikers and runners who join him so they can be part of history. Equally central to the story is Jenny Jurek. North is as much her story as her husband’s. She is the backbone of the operation—managing logistics, preparing meals, offering emotional support, and driving their van/temporary home, ‘Castle Black’, to the next remote location to meet her exhausted husband. Her journey is marked by her own resilience and strength, especially poignant considering her recovery from a miscarriage. We recognise their different personalities, but also how they are united by this physical and spiritual journey in the midst of America’s green wilderness.
If North is about a wound belonging to a single body, then Martin Scorsese’s film Killers of the Flower Moon is about wounds belonging to a people.
Based on David Grann’s 2017 non-fiction book, Scorsese tells a largely forgotten dark chapter of American history—the systematic murder of the oil-rich Osage Nation in 1920s Oklahoma. Scorsese said that when he read the book, he knew he had to make it into a movie. He spent several hours with Chief Standing Bear to convince the Osage Nation to help with the movie. The result is an absorbing film, even if it’s often shocking as we watch the escalating tragedy. It’s every bit a Scorsese crime picture, one of greed, power, and corruption.
Robert De Niro and Leonardo DiCaprio are both excellent as evil operating in daylight. These men treat murder as a matter of course, a matter of profit. De Niro in particular is highly effective as William King Hale, a manipulative figure who plays political games, becoming an ally to both the Osage and the white settlers while orchestrating heinous crimes for personal gain. There’s no remorse.
Just as powerful in her role is Lily Gladstone, as the wealthy Osage, Mollie Burkhart. She is married to DiCaprio’s Ernest, and watches members of her family murdered one by one, including her two sisters, while discovering she is suffering from diabetes herself, leaving her in terrible pain and confined to bed. Although she tries to bring together her community, as well as hire the newly created FBI to bring the killers to justice, she ultimately just wants to survive and be afforded basic human rights. Her portrayal keeps the character grounded in a harrowing reality.
Killers of the Flower Moon has a runtime of nearly three and a half hours. That might be a problem for some, but as the great film critic Roger Ebert said, “No good film is too long, and no bad film is too short.” This is a good film, and an important one as Scorsese questions the misdeeds of America in the last century in a way that links them to the polarised issues of today.
In both North and Killers of the Flower Moon, there is a connected theme: the relationship between strength and vulnerability. In North, Jurek’s vulnerability amid his injuries is set against his physical and mental strength. Similarly, Killers of the Flower Moon reveals the vulnerability of an entire community subjected to a terrible injustice, yet their story is one of enduring strength. Today, the federally recognised Osage Nation has approximately 20,000 enrolled members.
Killers of the Flower Moon is unafraid to explore the darker chapters of history, both to acknowledge them and to learn from them. This type of reflection might seem trite until you’ve faced some serious adversity in life. I recently joined a heart surgery support group on Facebook, and sharing my story, as well as hearing others, has been an important part of the healing process. In writing North, Jurek reflected on his darkest moments and tried to learn from them. Ironically, I believe it was those moments, when staring into that dreaded abyss, that kept him moving forward.
The journey back typically doesn’t announce itself with a starter gun and thousands of people cheering at a start line. More often, it begins from a far less grand position. That might be a physiotherapist, a pair of trainers, and one careful step towards feeling normal again.
And recognising that the landscape ahead might be the same, but the person running it is not.
Pass It On
If this idea was worth your time, it may be worth someone else’s.
Share this essay with a friend:
https://www.deeplifejourney.com/deep-life-reflections/january-26-2024
If you have a thought you’d like to share, please leave a comment below.
You can read all previous issues of Deep Life Reflections here.