Moving Targets

            Beginning archery lessons in a grade school YMCA summer day camp:  I seem to have a vague memory of bow in hand and wobbly arrow shot.  I was better at hitting tin can targets with a BB gun.

            I’d like to think I actually hit a bullseye once in a while, but that could well be in the wishful thinking department, right along with my mistaken belief that because I had read about horseback riding in Trixie Belden books that meant I could actually do it.  Anyway, targets are hard to hit when you are a beginner.  With time and practice, though, you can improve.  But what happens if they start to move erratically?  Unless you’re a sharpshooter, you’re sunk.

            Despite close to twenty years of aiming at fibromyalgia’s moving targets, my aim to eliminate pain is still wobbly.  Just when I think I know where the target is, it moves and morphs into something new.  The pain changes locations.  It even changes its essence:  aching to stabbing to burning to lightning bolt.  Muscle to bone to joint to skin.  One evening this week my left leg was cramping badly.  Thinking to ease the pain, I got out the muscle rub gel.  The second I touched my leg, I had a nasty surprise:  not only was the muscle cramping, but the skin was suddenly excruciatingly sensitive to touch.  Aargh.

            Of course, pain is not the only moving target.  There is the foggy brain target, the tired target, the skin rash target, the gastrointestinal target, the clumsy target, and other body system targets I cannot remember right now.  You take aim at the targets with any weapon at your disposal:  prescription medications, alternative medicine, diet, supplements, gentle exercise.  And just when you think you have hit the bullseye, the target moves or changes.  Sometimes it disappears altogether and you think that all your target practice has paid off . . . until days, months, or years later that particular target reappears, usually with some new target-friends in tow.

            Even though my aim is still not so good, I have learned that there is much more to life than target practice.  In fact, sometimes the best thing to do is to just take a break and aim my sights elsewhere.  Let the targets be.  But don’t deny they still exist like I did a few minutes ago, wrestling with a leaf bag and the “easy-to-use” cardboard leaf chute.  Ten minutes of awkward struggle in the garage (I did not want the neighbors to see my clownish clumsiness) left me too tired to tackle last fall’s pile of leaves against the fence.  And all that work only succeeded in ripping open the side of the bag and reminding me of the pain targets in hands and arms and shoulder and neck. 

            On the bright side, at least I know where today’s targets are.