The Mind That Follows
Two women, two very different decisions, and the same order of operations: the body first, the words after.
For weeks, Sarah kept losing words mid-sentence. Names escaping her, a fog that followed any period of stress. She researched it for three evenings before she brought it up in session, and by then she had already been taking lion's mane mushroom for two weeks.
“I found this myself,” she said. “I knew what I needed, and I went looking. That still surprises me.”
“What surprises you?”
“That my body asked first. The reading came after, to confirm. Usually it's the other way round. I read something, I decide I need it, then I check whether my body agrees.”
“And this time?”
“This time the empty place came first. The mushroom found me because I was already looking, and I was looking because my body had made it clear to me.”
She ran out of the greens she'd been taking alongside it and, being busy, forgot to buy more for ten days. Her digestion held steady, but for three nights running she woke at three in the morning with a feeling she'd come to recognise. She bought more. The waking stopped. She sat with that for a while and decided that trust could come before understanding. Her body had already shown her as much.
Months later and a different woman: Emma, looking at a map on an ordinary April evening with no particular intention, letting the cursor drift west into the hills. She called her friend Claire. “A long weekend. May. Just walking. What do you think?” A pause. “Yes,” Claire said.
Three days later, on the third morning, sky cleared, hills sharp in the cold air, Emma stood at the top of a long wet climb and looked at a view earned by nothing except the fact that her body had wanted to go up it. Fifty-three years old, legs tired, mud on her jacket. Entirely herself.
Two days after getting home, boots still on the hallstand, she called Claire again. “I've been thinking. June. Tell me about June again.” Claire told her about the Camino, the six weeks, the way the body stops trying to manage the distances after a few days and simply walks instead.
Emma noticed her own hand had moved to her belly while Claire was speaking. She hadn't put it there deliberately. Something was being decided that the mind hadn't voiced yet. When she hung up, she sat with the question rather than reaching for a calendar or a pen. The following week, without quite admitting why, she bought better boots.
Neither woman argued herself into a decision. The body moved first, toward a mushroom, toward a mountain, and the reasoning came along afterward to keep it company.
That was the answer, in the order in which the body gives answers. Boots first. Words later, if at all.