The Body Knows Before We Do

I was halfway along the boardwalk when the goosebumps started. Then came the tears.

The music was Arrival of the Birds, which is a piece that doesn't ask for your attention. It quietly finds it. There are no words in it, nothing to argue with, just strings gathering slowly the way weather gathers, and by the time you notice what it's doing to you it has already done it.

Nothing bad had happened.

In fact, something very good had.

Earlier that morning I'd sent someone I care deeply about a message I'd been carrying around for a while. Not a long message. Just a true one. I told him I trusted him completely. I told him what that trust had changed in me, which is not a small thing to say out loud when you've spent years being careful, editing yourself down before anyone could do it for you, checking every sentence at the door to make sure it wouldn't cost too much.

He received it with such kindness that something inside me softened.

I don't think I realised quite how much until I was walking. That's the thing about the body. It doesn't send a memo. It waits until you're on a boardwalk with the ocean on one side and the morning doing its ordinary beautiful thing on the other, and then it lets go of whatever it's been holding, and the letting go arrives as goosebumps first and tears second, and you stand there leaking quietly in your walking clothes like a completely normal person.

Then, twenty minutes later, Firestarter came on.

Without thinking, I ran.

Not because I suddenly became a runner. Not because I'd made a plan, or set a goal, or decided this was the year of the run. Because my body wanted to. Because the song said move and something in me said yes before the committee upstairs could convene a meeting about it.

Afterwards I went looking, the way I do, and I learnt there's a word researchers use for those moments when we're suddenly overwhelmed by connection, gratitude, beauty or love. It's called kama muta. People describe tears, goosebumps, warmth in the chest, the feeling of being deeply moved. I'm not telling you this because the tears needed explaining. I'm telling you because finding the word gave me permission to stop apologising for them. There is a whole field of people studying the thing that happened to me on the boardwalk. It has a name. It is not a malfunction.

We usually think tears belong to grief.

Sometimes they belong to safety.

I've spent a lot of my life believing healing would feel like finally becoming calm. Like arriving somewhere quiet and staying there. A flat, even place where nothing surges and nothing spills, where the nervous system sits with its hands folded like a good student.

I'm beginning to wonder if, sometimes, healing feels more like this.

Crying because a piece of music breaks your heart open on an ordinary Wednesday. Then unexpectedly running down a boardwalk because your favourite song tells you to move, and there is nothing in you left over to veto it.

Maybe the body knows something before the mind catches up. Maybe it always has, and the mind is just the last one to the party, arriving with its clipboard, asking what everyone's celebrating.

Maybe safety doesn't just help us rest.

Maybe safety gives us enough freedom to play.

I didn't run very far. About a hundred metres. No one watching would have thought anything was happening at all. A middle-aged woman in walking clothes, breaking into a brief and unremarkable jog, then slowing back down, smiling at nothing.

But that's not really the story.

The story is that, for the first time in a very long time, my body didn't ask, "Am I safe?"

It asked,

"Shall we run?"