I've been watching my son move.
There's a fluidity to him, still a little clumsy, still finding his edges, but underneath that, something I can only describe as ease. His body does what it's asked without argument. Without bracing. Without the small, constant negotiations I've come to accept as normal in my own.
One of the things that has always struck me about toddlers, and I say always, because I remember noticing this long before I had one of my own, is the way they squat effortlessly. They fold all the way down and come back up again as though gravity is simply a thing they're in conversation with, not in conflict with.
I used to think it was just their size. That being small and low to the ground made it look easier than it was.
But I don't think that anymore.
Every evening, as part of winding down for sleep, I massage Tyson's legs. It started as something instinctive, he sought movement and pressure, craved it to help him regulate, and his legs were always where he wanted to be touched. Now he asks for it. He'll come to me and say in his cute voice "massage" already knowing what his body needs and not afraid to ask for it.
What I notice, every time, is this: his legs are toned. There is real strength there. But they are never knotted. Never braced. Never holding anything they don't need to hold.
I know what tension feels like under my hands. I know the difference between a muscle that is strong and a muscle that is guarding. His legs have never learned to guard.
And I find myself wondering, when did mine?
Somewhere between childhood and now, the body learns to hold. We suck our stomachs in. We tighten our jaws. We stand with our feet turned out, our weight shifted forward, our shoulders quietly raised. We call it posture. We call it presence. But really, so much of it is protection. A kind of low-level bracing against a world that moves too fast and asks too much.
Tension becomes so familiar it stops feeling like tension. It just feels like you.
What I'm slowly learning, through my hands on his legs, through my own fascia work, through the strange and humbling process of trying to stand the way I once did without thinking about it, is that suppleness is not a quality of youth. It was never supposed to leave. The body is designed to be strong and soft at the same time. Toned but fluid. Stable but responsive.
We just forgot. Or rather, the world we live in made it very hard to remember.
Watching my son move is like being handed a memory I didn't know I'd lost. Not a nostalgic one. A living one. A reminder that this is still possible. That the body can be taught back to ease. That real strength, the kind that lasts, the kind that actually holds you, doesn't come from gripping.
It comes from letting go of everything you were never meant to carry.