Four months ago, I went through an emergency knee surgery because of a destroyed meniscus. Needless to say I was not mentally prepared to lose my capacity to walk overnight. One month of a leg-long brace preventing me from moving, bending or twisting my knee. This experience made me realize how, all my life, I have constantly taken my body’s basic functions for granted. The same phenomenon happens when you find yourself sick and cannot breathe normally through your nose, you then realize how easy your life seemed back when you could. Although, my experience was much more invalidating, the basic sensory concept is the same. This relates to the concept of a Lifeworld. A Lifeworld is the world that we take for granted, the world we live into when we don’t reflect on it. “The Lifeworld, le Lebenswelt, is the world of our common, immediate lived experiences” (Good 1994 ,122). It can be disrupted by illness or temporary disabilities. Exactly like when I woke up in the hospital, unable to move my leg at all.

 Kaufman’s text « Chronic illness experience of stroke: followed patients who suffered a stroke, and evaluated the emotional and physical toll it had on their lives and lifeworlds. « Phenomenologists describe the illness experience as dehumanizing, compromising, and altering one’s life world through changing what ones takes for granted ». (Kaufmann 2011, 4) The case example of Mr. Brown shows that he, who was used to being physically active and well mannered, was deeply impaired by the stroke. He suddenly went from being able to take care of himself to needing help for everything. This sudden change impaired the way he saw himself as well as the body he took for granted. Previous life experience shaped how badly the illness affected his lifeworld because of how big the change was. The more impact an illness has on the emotional and physical capacities, the more it will hinder one’s self embodied and linguistic experiences.

As of my experience, I have never had problems relating to walking before so I never stopped and considered how fortunate I was. Taking walking for granted is, to some level, fundamentally universal. Most people around the world are able to learn to walk without much effort. A newborn held upright minutes after his/her birth will instictively put one foot after another. A body function as elemental as walking was not questionned by anybody in my entourage and I did not either. But facing a situation in which I would not be able to walk for more than a month made me realize how our body altogether is taken for granted. Take our sensory experiences for example. We are able to experience breathtaking sounds, colors and smells all the time, but we never stop to think about how fascinating those experiences are. We do think about the aspects of said sounds, colors and smells but not usually about how our body came to relay them to our brains.

In this blog, I will appraise and cogitate the different ways we constantly take our bodies for granted and how we can gain awareness of its beauty and diversity through different experiences and testimonies.

Works cited :

Kaufman, Sharon R. 1988. “Toward a Phenomenology of Boundaries in Medicine: Chronic Illness Experience in the Case of Stroke.” Medical Anthropology Quarterly

Good, Byron. 1994. “The body, illness experience, and the lifeworld: a phenomenological account of chronic pain” in Medicine, Rationality, and Experience: An Anthropological Perspective. Cambridge University Press