OR My hip replacement surgery has lost its glamour.

I’m two weeks out from surgery and this just isn’t special anymore. I’m not in enough pain to elicit sympathy, but I am not recovered enough to move without discomfort. I spend most of most days in bed surrounded by all the collected paraphernalia of my Work, convalescence, and home. They all happen in the same space and sometimes at the same time.

Working from home for the last five years (even before it was Covid-cool) helped me build structures around my time and physical space that honored my Work, accommodated my job, and protected my home. But post-surgery, those boundaries have collapsed.

I need company almost everywhere—walking up and down the stairs, going to the bathroom, and leaving the house. I can’t drive myself. I can’t stand for long periods of time, and I can’t sit comfortably either. I basically do everything while propped up in my bed.

I have lost all the boundaries that framed and contained me. Without bounds, I seep out and over, losing my shape, undefining the space I take up in the world. 

We are encouraged to see boundaries as limits to be destroyed or as margins to be defended. Boundaries either keep us from growth or protect us from intrusion. But I see boundaries a little differently—as outlines of the container, the vessel, the amphora, the metaphor that is me.

Boundaries create a safe space that I expand and fill and, in doing so, I re-outline the space I take up in the world.

As I move out from under the confusion and press of physical pain, my body with its new hip is revisiting how it moves in and experiences the space around it. I am reshaping my metaphors—my capturing devices—by redrawing who I am and what I put into the world.

Starting with this website. Over the coming weeks, I will redefine www.capturingdevice.com as a blog site to make space for a new website through which I will offer workshops, coaching, and community to connect you to the words that connect you to your metaphors of time, Work, purpose, body, and space.

How do you take up space and how do you bound the space that is you? What metaphors help you contain and protect yourself as you move through the world?