Ancient physio wisdom

It takes me a while for things to sink in.
I've never been much of an exerciser, but I am determined to not "go gently into that good night," words that  Dylan Thomas immortalized.
And I'll be 74 in a few days, get aches and pains like everyone else on this planet does at this age. Exercise is the preventive medicine. I believe that, after spending a lot of time learning about nerves and interoception.  

So I finally landed on something I did not hate doing, which I call "weight-walking," which involves holding weights overhead as high up as I can while walking around inside my condo. A usual trip is 48 steps. 

I started off with 10-lb weights,  just one or two trips a day. 
Then, yesterday I changed it up. I did a walk with 5-lb weights. So easy. But it woke up the pathways. 
A few hours later, another with 8-lb weights. Still easy, and, and, ooh, pathways opened a bit wider. 
Another later on, the usual 10-lb weights. Less easy but totally doable because more familiar.

Then, a tiny miracle, I felt enough dopamine in me that a few hours later I did a 4th (a 4th walk! Unheard of!) with (ta-dah, drum roll...) fifteen-pound weights! For the first time! 

I have relationships with my weights. 
First of all, they are my own private weights, not left over from my clinic. I've had them at home for a decade at least, have played with them various ways. Never very seriously.
The 5-lb weights have a blue non-slip coating which feels pleasant to my hands.
The 8-lb weights are a nice bright orange colour.
The 10-lb ones are black.
They all feel soothing smooth room-temperature to my hands. 
But the 15-lb weights are naked steel and bumpy and my hands never really liked them. So macho. What was I thinking when I bought those? Truth is, they were the only ones available at the time and I was in an optimistic mood that someday it wouldn't matter that they felt so unattractive to my hands in the brain space where I have spent most of my life, focused on what I feel through those hands, haptic cognition I call it, or the one for my eyes, eyes that have an unwaveringly friendly relationship with every colour on earth, probably a carry-over from art school days where I learned to draw and paint and see space as a shape, a deliberately awakened visual cognition.
But I do not want to digress too much. 
Those ugly weights had sat there inert for years.

This post is about a new (for me) kinesthetic cognition, neither visual or haptic. 
It's about graded exposure and how I finally after all this time can see how graded exposure is a sneaky way of making friends with the parts of one's own brain that hate exercise, and weights unless they feel comfy through glabrous palmar skin and look attractive to the eyeballs.
Not by being operative (power-over), which a lot of physio is, but by being interactive with those parts, encouraging them instead of overwhelming them. And in the end they become willing to do things all by themselves. And come on, that's the entire point of anything we do in rehab, isn't it? 

For me, it was a sense of triumph I had never really experienced for myself, or truly integrated, from exercise. I can see now how people can easily become addicted to it.
I mean, in spite of the noceboic aspect of these 15-lb weights, grey steel, bumpy, heavy, etc., and the nociceptive aspect, the heavy bumpy cold steel-ness of them against my palms, in spite of all that, I succeeded in carrying them overhead without too much trembling (my arms wondered at first, WTF is she doing to us? But only at first, because as soon as I was aware of trembles happening I also felt a surge of steadiness arise all by itself; I did not have to use any willpower, my critter brain just took over all by itself and enough strength ensued automatically. It was so pleasant to feel my physicality function well all by itself and require no push from the "me" space where I usually reside.  
I guess you could call that kinesthetic cognition. Deliberately induced kinesthetic cognition. Never too late! :)
Had I been able to experience this sense of power arriving in my body so effortlessly much earlier in life I might have been more attracted to the wealth of knowledge that exists about motor output side of the nervous system my profession is so heavily invested in, rather than the sensory input side of the nervous system, mostly ignored by my profession, but important for mental health of individuals, I would argue, based on just this one little experience, significant to absolutely nobody but myself. 

Anyway, yay physiotherapy, it taught me something way back in first year as mere protocol that I finally figured out the meaning of, all these decades later. So, thank you, former profession of mine. Thank you very much. Now I know, have experienced, have cognized how it actually works, in my own human anti-gravity suit.