No Whining Wednesday – The Way You Carry It

Welcome back to another episode of No Whining Wednesday! Today, you cannot whine, criticize, or complain.

If you are new to this blog or new to this segment please visit the NWW page here for past episodes.

Today’s inspiring word comes from a powerful word from Lena Horne:

When you think about physically carrying something, you know that how you carry it makes a big difference. The proper way to lift heavy items is to bend your hips and knees to squat down, keep them close to your body, and straighten your legs to lift. If you do this wrong, you could hurt your back. It is also recommended never to lift a heavy object above shoulder level and avoid turning or twisting your body while lifting or holding a heavy object.

“Lift with your legs, not with your back.” That old saying is true for a reason: “The muscles in the legs and buttocks are bigger and more power­ful than the tiny back muscles,” notes Clare Safran-Norton, clinical supervisor of rehabilitation services at Harvard-affiliated Brigham and Women’s Hospital.”

-https://www.health.harvard.edu/staying-healthy/boost-your-ability-to-lift-and-carry-heavy-loads

You also have to determine what it is you are lifting. Is it a box with liquid in it? Is it fragile? Can you even carry it by yourself? And even if you have people to help you, is it better to use a vehicle or crane or something to help carry it?

Raise your hand if you’ve ever tried to balance something on your head like the women in Africa?

The women carry large loads on their heads. Although it looks strenuous, “a study found that African women can carry up to 20% of their body weight on their heads without increasing their rate of energy consumption.” (LA Times)

“In Ghana, women glide through Accra’s central market with such improbable burdens on their heads as a cage full of live chickens, a card table piled with glassware, a 100-pair-high stack of blue jeans. In southern Sudan, Dinka women walk for miles with only a ring of palm fronds padding their shaved skulls from the weight of 80-pound clay pots brimming with sorghum beer. Here in Nairobi, girls skip home from school, holding hands with each other, bundles of books on their heads.”

https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1986-12-07-mn-1243-story.html

Now, let’s remove the physical aspect of carrying large loads and think of it mentally, emotionally, and spiritually.

Because no one can see the heaviness we carry, we sometimes overestimate the importance of asking for help or putting the burden down (letting go). Sometimes, we might even need to break a situation down into parts we can manage.

A quick story.

I am always doing laundry. I don’t know what it is, but clothes seem to come out of nowhere. Mind you, there are only two people in this house. Because I wash a lot, I purchase detergent in bulk. It comes in these giant buckets (see image) from a black-owned general store in Marietta, Georgia. This place is better than the dollar tree. Anytime I need something in bulk, I go there first, from paper plates to detergent, and it’s very affordable.

Because the buckets are so heavy, we pour the detergent into the smaller containers we have left over. I don’t usually do this because even to pour it into the containers requires lifting the bucket, so this is hubby’s job. Until one day, I tried to be a superwoman…

Chile, it was a mess. I ended up wasting detergent everywhere. I got the job done, but it would have been so much easier to ask for help. All I had to do was walk upstairs and ask the man to pour more detergent, but I wanted to do it myself.

Ya’ll see where I’m going with this, right? Of course, you do.

Another quick story

Several months ago we got a new TV for the basement. The thing was huge and could not fit into the car. Ya’ll, people were literally laughing at us trying to figure out how to make it work in that Walmart parking lot. We turned it every which way, took it out of the box, everything. What in the world were we thinking of getting a TV that big without a truck? A mess. Thankfully, a friend of my husband’s walked up, and guess what he was driving? A truck.

Sometimes what we are carrying is not the problem; it’s how we carry it that breaks us down. Occasionally, we don’t have to carry it at all.

“Bag lady you goin’ hurt yo back
Draggin all them bags like that
I guess nobody ever told you
All you must hold on to
Is you, is you, is you.” – Erykah Badu