Willow Space

Feel It Finally Let Go.

Retired eighteen months. My walking partner finally said it: I still walk like someone's waiting to fire me. Nobody is. She stopped on the lake path last month, let me get twenty feet ahead, and called after me: "Ginny. You walk like someone's waiting to fire you." Let me be efficient about this. Louise and I have walked the lake at 6:15 every morning for eleven years. I have been retired for eighteen months. There is no one waiting anywhere. And I was, at that moment, at 6:22 on a Wednesday, twenty feet ahead of my best friend, head forward, hips locked, on the balls of my feet, walking toward the end of a conference-room hallway that I have not set foot in since March of last year. I stopped. I turned around. She was standing there with her hands on her hips. She said, "I've been walking behind you for eleven years. I thought it was fitness. It's not fitness. You don't walk. You arrive. Every step. Where are you going?" I didn't have an answer. I want to tell you what "efficient" actually is, because it's on thirty-two years of my performance reviews, and my best friend twenty feet behind me on a lake path is the reason I'm writing this. My name is Ginny. I'm sixty-four. I spent thirty-two years in human resources, the last fourteen as the director for a medical-device company in the western suburbs of Minneapolis. Nineteen hundred employees. Which means, let me be efficient, that for thirty-two years my job was to walk down a hallway toward a door, behind which someone was about to cry, or be terminated, or file a complaint, or tell me a thing about a manager that I would then have to carry down another hallway toward another door. I did the arithmetic once, in the car, the week I retired. Something over eleven thousand difficult conversations. Call it one and a half a day. Every one of them at the end of a walk. You learn to walk a certain way toward that door. Head forward. Chin down, slightly. Hips set. Weight forward, on the balls of the feet, so you can't be stopped in the hall. Stride long and even so no one can read anything in it. You do not stroll to a termination. You arrive. I have been separated from my role. My body was not notified. Everyone says the same word about me, and has since my first review in 1993. "Ginny is so efficient." My CEO said it at my send-off. My husband says it. My son says it, and not always kindly. I have been proud of it for three decades. I want to take that word apart, because it is a description of a woman who has never once arrived anywhere. She has only gotten there. Here is what efficient looks like from the inside, since no one has asked, because the whole point of an efficient woman is that she doesn't require the meeting. I walk like I'm late. Everywhere. To the mailbox. Through the grocery store, where I pass people in the aisles and only notice that I've done it at the checkout. On a beach in Naples, Florida, in February, in sandals, on vacation, my husband forty feet behind me, calling my name. My hips are locked. There's a place at the front of each hip, deep, where a muscle has been pulling me forward for thirty-two years, and it does not let go when I sit. I sit on it. I sleep on it. I found out it had a name at physical therapy, and I found out it had a length, and that mine was about two inches shorter than it should be, and the therapist said, "You've been leaning into something for a long time." My head is ahead of my body. My son took a photo of me at his wedding, walking down the aisle to my seat, and my head is a full six inches in front of my shoulders. I look like a woman going to deliver bad news at a wedding. I cannot walk with anyone. Tom has stopped trying. Louise walks behind me. My son, at six-foot-two, has said, "Mom, slow down," on every walk we've taken since he was nine. And I have never once, in thirty-two years, seen anything on a walk. Louise asked me last month what color the boathouse on the lake was. I've passed it four thousand times. I didn't know. I told my doctor. He said, "Ginny, you were an HR director for fourteen years. You're a very efficient person. That's just how you're built. Try to slow down." Efficient. There it is. In the chart. Efficient is the word for a woman who has never once arrived. It is not a compliment. It is a description of a walk, and the walk is a description of an order. When they say you're so efficient, what they mean is: she gets there. And here's the thing no one tells the efficient woman: in 1993, walking down my first hallway toward my first door, my body received an instruction. Get there. Don't be stopped. Lean in. Be ready for what's behind the door. And the body obeyed, because it was a good employee, and it obeyed for thirty-two years, eleven thousand doors, and in March of last year the badge was turned in and the office was cleared and the CEO gave a speech, and no one, at any point, told the body it could walk like a woman with nowhere to be. It's still leaning toward the door. There's no door. It leans anyway. Around a lake, at 6:22, twenty feet ahead of the only person it's walking with. I was proud of being efficient. Thirty-two years. Let me be efficient: I was not efficient. I was braced, forward, toward a hallway that no longer exists, and my best friend had to stand still to show me. My father was a plant manager in Duluth for thirty-eight years, and I never once saw him stroll. He walked from the car to the house like he was going to a shift. He walked to church like the line was down. He walked, at his own retirement party, from the parking lot to the door of the hall with his head forward and his hands ready, and my mother, beside me, watched him and said, very quietly, "He's still going in." He was still going in for the rest of his life. He walked the mall in winter, the way retired men in Duluth do, at a plant manager's pace, and passed every one of his friends, every lap, and they'd call after him, "Ed! It's not a race!" and he'd wave without turning around. At the service, in the receiving line, every man from the plant said the same thing to my mother, one after the other, like it was the eulogy: "Ed was the most efficient manager we ever had. Never wasted a step." I was forty-nine. I had walked from the car to the funeral home ahead of my husband, head forward, and waited for him at the door. I nodded. I'm sixty-four. I'm twenty feet ahead of Louise on a lake path. I'm on the same road my father walked, one long stride at a time, and every one of nineteen hundred employees would stand in a line and say I never wasted a step. That is why I'm writing this, instead of still going in. The woman who explained it to me is named Helen. She's seventy-four. She was a middle-school principal for thirty-one years, in Bloomington, and she walks the lake too, at seven, not 6:15, because she's been retired for nine years and "learned to sleep," and last month, the week after Louise stopped me, Helen fell into step beside me on the path, which no one can do, and did it, and said, "Louise told me she finally said something." I said Louise talks. Helen said, "I walked the halls of a middle school for thirty-one years, Ginny, at the pace of a woman going to break up a fight. Every bell, every hallway. I retired and I walked this lake for four years the same way, and my husband said, 'Helen, you're on patrol,' and he was right. I want to tell you what nobody's going to tell you, because everybody thinks you're just fit." I said the physical therapist said I was leaning into something. She said, "She's right, and she can't fix it, because it's not the hip. The hip is where it shows. Your body got told, thirty years ago, to be ready for what's behind the door. That's an order. And the body's good at orders. It set the hips and put the head forward and got you there, eleven thousand times, and nobody ever countermanded it. You can stretch a body that's under orders and it'll let you, and then it goes back to its orders. A trainer can't dismiss you. A mat can't. A book about slowing down certainly can't, you read it at a run. The order came in as a signal, from the inside, and somebody has to countermand it in the language it was given in. Which was never English. It was a hallway." I said, what signal. She said, "A calm voice and a low sound, spoken to the jaw first, and then down to the hips, in an order the body recognizes as the one that says: the hallway's over. You're not going in. Four minutes. The first night, I walked to my mailbox and Don said, 'Who's that?' Because he'd never seen me walk like a person." I want to go through what I'd tried before that path, because I tried it with a plan, with milestones, and because Helen had just told me why every milestone was addressed to the muscle and not the order. Physical therapy, for the hips. $95 a session, ten sessions, a very good therapist who found the muscle and stretched it and gave me the stretches to do at home. She does that job well. I did them. Efficiently. Twice a day. I stretched a muscle that was obeying an instruction, and it would lengthen for the stretch and then go right back, because it wasn't short. It was leaning. There's a difference, and it took me ten sessions and a lake path to understand it. The personal trainer, $80 an hour, who taught me to "walk from the hips." I walk from the hips very efficiently now. Toward the door. Yoga. Hip openers. I opened my hips on a mat and then stood up and leaned toward the exit. The walking meditation, on an app, that asked me to "feel each foot meet the ground." I felt each foot meet the ground on my way somewhere. Massage, monthly. The therapist works the front of the hip and says, "This is really tight," and I say, I know, and I get off the table and walk to the desk to pay, head forward. The book about slowing down. I read it in a weekend. Helen had said it by the boathouse, and let me be efficient and give it to you in her words. "Every one of those tools works from the outside. And the order to brace comes from the inside. You cannot knead an instruction out of a nervous system. Every single thing on that list treats the tissue. Nothing on that list countermands the order. Different address entirely." I was not receptive, and I'll be efficient about admitting it. She said it was an audio program. I said, "Helen, I ran a wellness benefit for nineteen hundred people. I've seen every app. You're describing a recording." She said, "I'm describing the only thing that's ever spoken to the part of you that's still walking down the hall." She played it for me on a bench by the boathouse, one earbud each, two women who between us had walked sixty-three years of hallways, and I sat, which I do not do on a walk. A calm voice. A low sound under it. The voice went to my jaw, and my jaw, which I had not known was set, unset. And then it went down, and the place at the front of my hips, the two-inches-short place, did something the physical therapist had never gotten it to do in ten sessions: it let go from the inside, not from being pulled, and my weight went back off the balls of my feet and onto my whole foot, sitting on a bench, and I felt, for the first time since 1993, like a woman who was where she was. The boathouse is green, by the way. I looked. Then she made me a list, on the back of her parking receipt, of what it would have to be for a body like ours, and I'll give it to you the way I'd give it in a benefits meeting: exactly. "It couldn't be effort. No technique to perform, nothing to be skilled at. It had to speak under the conscious mind, in signal, not instruction — because the order it's countermanding was never verbal. It had to go station by station, in the order the body actually holds: jaw first — the jaw is the front desk of the whole operation — then down. All the way down. It had to be short enough to survive a working woman's actual evening. Minutes. Not a course, not a practice, not a lifestyle. And you had to own it outright. No app. No subscription. Nobody harvesting a streak out of you." The one at the bottom of the receipt was the Somatic De-Armoring System, from Sacred Willow. A woman named Amanda makes it. $37 once for the full program. Start with four minutes tonight. It works from the inside. A calm voice and a low sound that speak to the part of you that took the order, and end the shift. Not stretching. Not training. Not hands. Not a book you read at a run. Five focused releases, each in Guided and Instrumental versions. Ten audio tracks in all. Start with the calm voice, or choose just the sound. Both versions are included: Jaw-to-Belly Release, four minutes. The one you start with tonight. The jaw first, because you set it in the hallway, and then down. Pelvic Floor Drop, three minutes. For the held middle. For the woman who's ready for what's behind the door. Psoas Release, three minutes. This is the one. The "about to" muscle, the two-inches-short place at the front of the hip, the lean itself. Helen calls it "the one that tells the hips the meeting's canceled." Shake-Off, ten minutes. For all thirty-two years at once. Deep Delta Melt, twenty minutes. For sleeping like a woman with nowhere to be at 6:15. Headphones on. Press play and follow the calm voice. I know what you're thinking, because I said it to Tom that night, word for word: "A retired principal on a bench and a recording, for thirty-two years of hallways." He's watched me from forty feet behind on every beach we've ever walked. He said, "Ginny, you read the book about slowing down in a weekend." You also get the De-Armoring Map and the Two-Minute Self-Scan, so you can take your own inventory, and find the places you're holding that you've never once thought to check. $37, once. Stream in your phone's browser or download the tracks to keep. No app to install and no subscription. And a 365-day guarantee: if it isn't right for you, email any time within 365 days for a full refund. You keep everything anyway. I wrote severance agreements for fourteen years. No one hands a stranger a year. Start with four minutes tonight: 👉 go.mywillowspace.com/dearmor/19 What happened, in order, with the milestones, because I can't help it. Night one: four minutes, on the sofa, after dinner. The jaw unset. The hips did the thing from the bench, halfway. I noticed my feet were flat on the floor and that I had, apparently, been sitting on the sofa for eighteen months on the balls of my feet. Day two: the mailbox. I walked to it. I noticed, halfway there, that I was not going to get there any sooner by leaning, and that I wasn't leaning, and that my head was over my shoulders, and I looked at the neighbor's maple, which has been there for twenty years, and which is enormous. Not because I'd told myself to slow down. Because the instruction to get there had been countermanded, and a body with no door ahead of it walks like a person. Week one: the grocery store. I did not pass anyone. I walked behind a woman with a cart at her pace for an entire aisle and did not know I'd done it until the end of the aisle, and it was fine. Nothing was behind the door. There's no door in the cereal aisle. Week two is the one that counts, because it came with a number from someone who had no idea I'd changed anything and measures things for a living. My son is a mechanical engineer, and he had taken a photo of Louise and me from the far side of the lake, from behind, the way he does, and that evening he sent it with a second photo beside it: the one from his wedding, me walking down the aisle to my seat. He'd put a ruler on both, because he puts a ruler on everything. He looked at one. He looked at the other. He looked at the first one again, he told me, and then he texted the question. "Who is this? Six inches at the wedding. Zero at the lake. Mom, what did you do?" Six inches ahead of my shoulders to zero, from a man who measures tolerances for a living and had never once mentioned the six. The lake itself came that Wednesday, 6:15, with the witness who's been twenty feet behind me for eleven years. Louise and I started out, and at the boathouse, which is green, I realized she was beside me. Not behind. Beside. She'd noticed before I did. She'd been looking at me sideways for a quarter mile. She said, "Ginny." I said I know. She said, "You're walking next to me. Eleven years. You've never once walked next to me. I've been looking at the back of your vest since 2014." And she put her arm through mine, which you cannot do with a woman who's leaning toward a door, and we walked the rest of the lake like two women walking a lake, and I could tell you what we passed. A heron. Two kayaks. The boathouse, which is green. Week four: Tom. Naples, on the beach, the same beach. He was beside me. He didn't call my name once, because I was there to be called. He said, at dinner, "You walked with me today." I said I walk with you every day. He said, "No. You walked with me." Week six: the physical therapist re-measured the hip and said, "What did you do?" and wrote it down. And the milestone I haven't hit, because I report those too: the grocery store still gets me some days. I catch myself at the end of an aisle having passed three people. I stop, and I let them by, and I go on at their pace. I've told three women. Helen, who started it, and who texts me at 9:30 at night, one word: "Pace?" And two from my old leadership team, both retired, both of whom walk like they're going to a termination, both of whom, when I said "there's no door," stopped walking, on the sidewalk outside a restaurant, and stood there. Three efficient women, three hallways, ninety-one years of getting there. Three weeks, every one of us, before we walked beside somebody. So let me be efficient, one last time, and tell you what I'd say if you were twenty feet ahead of me. You don't need an HR badge. If you spent thirty years walking toward hard rooms, at work, at a hospital, at a school, in a family. If you walk like you're late to the mailbox, and you can check that by walking to it. If your head is ahead of your shoulders in every photo. If there's a place at the front of your hips that doesn't let go when you sit. If you've never once walked beside anyone. If you can't tell me the color of a thing you've passed four thousand times. If every review you ever got called you efficient, or brisk, or on it: that's the word for a body under orders, and the order was to get there, and no one ever told it the hallway's over. You're not fit. You're leaning. And a lean doesn't come out from the outside, not with a stretch, not with a trainer, not with a book. It comes out the way it went in, as a signal, from the inside, four minutes at a time. Tonight. On the sofa. After dinner. There are two ways this goes for women like us, and you are already on one of them. On the first road you get there, everywhere, for the rest of your life. Your best friend looks at the back of your vest for another eleven years and stops calling after you. Your husband walks forty feet behind you on every beach and stops saying your name. Your son puts a ruler on every photo and never sends the second one. You never see the maple, or the heron, or the color of the boathouse, and you walk to your own retirement party like you're going to a shift, and everyone you ever passed says you never wasted a step. On the other road, you walk beside someone, tonight. $37, once, yours forever, and a year to decide. 👉 go.mywillowspace.com/dearmor/19 P.S. I did the arithmetic, which I would have done anyway. Ten sessions of physical therapy, the trainer for a year, the monthly massage since 2019, the yoga, the app, the book — something over nine thousand dollars aimed at my own body from the outside. The order was never once on the receiving end of any of it. Thirty-seven dollars was the first money I ever spent on the inside of the problem. I'm keeping the physical therapist, for the record; she does a different job, and she's the one who asked what I did. And the fast test, before you spend a cent: walk to the end of your block right now. Notice where your head is relative to your feet, and whether you could describe one thing you passed. If you got there and couldn't say what color anything was, that's the hallway, and you've been in it for years. 👉 go.mywillowspace.com/dearmor/19 P.P.S. Tonight, flat on your back, arms at your sides, one honest minute: are your shoulders resting on the bed, or hovering just above it, on duty even there? If they're resting, close this and goodnight. If they're hovering — that half-inch is the whole story, and four minutes is where it starts. 👉 go.mywillowspace.com/dearmor/19