Muddy Care . Phase 4
So this blog is the exception in that I, the CEO of Muddy Care and the joint educational manager am writing the blog this week, not one of our muddies.
We are coming to the end of our long-term rehabilitation pilot programme. As an impact of COVID our pilot has gone from a nine-month pilot to a 24 month pilot. We never suspended our support through COVID. We kept going and actually increased our services and support. The impact evidence on health and wellbeing from our pilot is remarkable and the Muddy community has and is evolving into something extremely special and wonderful.
I want to write here a very warm and grateful, heartfelt thank you to Luke, Anna and Olivia of Drovers Cycles who have supported Muddy Care from the beginning. They have supplied us with some fantastic e bikes, an amazing recumbent e bike and some magical days out. They have helped change lives.
E bikes provide a freedom that many people with chronic conditions cannot achieve on a non-assisted bike. Myself and another Muddy have found a new passion for cycling through our e cycling experiences. With the help of Cannondale, my e bike is enabling me to take part in cycling adventures again, something my chronic conditions took from me.
We hope that in the future, in collaboration with Drover Cycles, we will be able to deliver a more long-term e bike rehabilitation education programme for the chronic condition community in the Brecon Beacons. Just bear with us please. We are working towards this. In the meantime, if you live in South Powys or are visiting the area and want to try e biking, please look up Drover Cycles. They have an amazing e bike selection (and a brilliant e recumbent bike too) and do drop offs and collections in the Brecon Beacons and surrounding area. We will also shortly be releasing cycle route cards specifically for people with chronic conditions, tried and tested by people with chronic conditions.
www.drovercycles.co.uk | Bike shop Hay on Wye Brecon Beacons
A perfect day
By the CEO Muddy Care AKA C1
As the philosopher Voltaire wrote…“Perfect is the enemy of good.”
And it is so true.
I have my own phrase now and that is,
“Aspire for imperfectly perfect.”
As I have adopted this phrase, I see the beauty rather than the ‘quite not right’ perspective far more often. And I see a lot more things as good. And good is absolutely fabulous.
Life can be beyond challenging when you have a serious chronic condition(s) and our journeys are a process of continuous adaptation and acceptance of managing imperfect situations. The truth is too, that the perfect I aspired to when I was healthy, was ironically not always healthy as it was sometimes built on materialism rather than memories, people, health and wellbeing.
Financial stability becomes incredibly difficult to maintain when you have a chronic condition(s) and this forces materialism to take a different priority in our schemas of life desires. The hardships, daily and weekly struggles and sometimes raw unfairness of having a chronic illness or condition(s) take you to a place sometimes that you cannot possibly imagine how truly awful it really is unless you have been there. When it first happened to me in 2011/12 it was so much worse than I feared. And that is why we need to adjust both our expectations and our priorities to be fair and kind to ourselves. And getting the basics right often causes us to simplify our lives…and that is a hugely healthy thing to do.
Having a chronic condition(s) makes you have perspective. You see much more clearly what is important and what isn’t and the ‘near death’ situation exemplifies this hierarchy of what is really important. It teaches you that you have to have the basics in place otherwise the wall just crumbles when life gets tough. You rarely sweat the small stuff because the big stuff comes your way more times than is fair. All your energy has to be saved up for that.
There weren’t many of us today for our first outdoor workshop since Autumn last year…illness, injury and adverse reactions to the vaccine. This area is one of favourite cycling places and sometimes I just come here to weather watch when I am too poorly to cycle. The weather is moody and can be utterly wild and utterly beautiful at the same time. I feel greatly at peace here (even when the weather is howling) and the view never gets tiresome. The weather is rarely perfect up here and yet today it was utterly perfect. I have never been up here in such good weather and Luke who is also very familiar with this area too commented he had never seen it so ‘weather perfect.’
Perfect can happen but the secret is to let perfect happen naturally. Aspire for good and see the beauty in imperfection. And if perfect happens, fab, but see the beauty in good. I have put on nearly two stone since August 2020 through no fault of my own but because of medication. It does test me and I know that some people see the ‘steroid Claire’ not the ‘no steroid Claire’. But it will drive you insane if you don’t learn to go with the flow and worry about other people’s judgments. Hopefully the weight will gradually start to come off and this time next year I will be about two stone lighter. I am still me though, with or without the steroid weight.
Today, we moved forwards with assistance from some fantastic e bikes and with smiles on all our faces. We did some outdoor mindfulness, our outdoor lessons and we were empowered by the natural landscape and weather. With a bit of support, some accessories to help make things easier for us and good people, perfect days are possible and so are good days. And adventures reinforce this.
As Muddy Care expands and grows, the more extraordinary people I meet and the greater I am inspired by the human condition as I am uplifted by seeing strength, bravery, authenticity, care, compassion and goodness in people of all shapes and sizes who have all travelled and are all travelling their own rocky road. Our chronic conditions are part of us. However, our conditions must never define nor stop us from moving forwards positively. The secret is to find the right road to follow, to adapt and put things in place to allow us to move forwards positively on this road and not to do it alone. Support allows us to be braver and to try things we can’t do alone. And sometimes that road creates perfect again, even if just for a short time.