I'm now at a point where I'm beginning to take tentative forays out walking without the full-leg brace, and I've found that the six weeks of relative inactivity has caused my right leg to lose most of its memory of how to walk. I can, indeed walk, and can even do so without much of a limp, but it takes very deliberate focus and concentration. I don't walk with habit right now, but with very conscious intent. Rather that walking on auto-pilot, I have to focus and very deliberately raise the knee, extend the calf while raising the toes, plant the heel, rock forward on the ball, and gently push off with the thigh to deliver my weight to the other leg. Again and again and again. It occurs to me the act of walking is really nothing more than a series of controlled forward falls. Odd that I didn't realize that until now.
Forgetting the deliberate actions that go into walking causes the leg to go spastic and wobble like overcooked spaghetti. A feeling of utter vertigo arises whenever I stop thinking about how to walk. Very peculiar indeed.
Every time I walk, then, becomes an exercise in meditative focus. A few minutes of this causes me to break a sweat, not through exertion so much as through mental concentration. There will come a time pretty soon when I'll walk again completely on autopilot, but the fact is that I enjoy the wonder of walking much more when paying attention to it.
