Balance - Is it a thing?

[IcePrincessKRS]

Matt can walk a fallen tree across a raging creek and not fall off. Makes me jealous.

[PhuturePriest]

I have really great balance, but I don't know if that's natural, or just because I've been doing karate for so many years.

[Tony]

Im just  straight clumsy in general. I can't ride a bike, at all. I tried and tried as a kid but couldn't do it. the coordination wasn't there. It's something called dyspraxia, Which isn't uncommon with folks with Aspergers which I also have. surprisingly I am decent at ice skating, however.

[IgnatiusofLoyola]

Interestingly, I had never heard the word "dyspraxia" until a few days ago, and I'm pretty sure I had it as a kid. I've never been clumsy, but had coordination issues. I couldn't tie my shoes until I was 8, I couldn't ride a bike until I was 10, etc. I was (and still am) VERY bad at sports. As a kid, my inability to learn tasks like tying my shoes was even more unexpected than usual because, based on a variety of tests, I was considered "gifted." I was able to learn most new things much more quickly than other kids (and as a result found school boring), but it took me longer than most other kids to learn physical tasks that required coordination. I eventually learned how to do things like tie my shoes and ride a bike, it just took me longer.

In my case, for a variety of reasons (I'll spare you the details), the doctors think I had undiagnosed polio when I was a baby/toddler. (It turns out that you can have polio without showing the standard symptoms.) In my case, the polio meant that I developed curvature of the spoine (the non-genetic kind), and one of my legs is about 1/2-3/4 of an inch longer than the other. The curvature of the spine (scoliosis) was treated with an incredibly ugly back brace (complete with chin rest) that I had to wear 24/7 from about age 13 to age 16. Having one leg longer than the other has really affected my balance. It made me very sad at the time it was diagnosed, because I really loved ballet, but ballet requires a dancer to be able keep their balance while standing on one leg, which I just can't do.

Nowadays, it's mostly an occasional inconvenience. I try to wear shoes that allow me to put a lift in one shoe, and that helps my balance a lot. And, as I've made life choices, I've simply avoided activities that required a lot of balance. As time goes on, you learn you can't really do anything you want (despite what all the motivational songs, speakers, etc would have you believe), but usually you can find something you like to do within the range of things you're good at. It's no surprise that the longest job in my career required me to learn very technical/detailed information about new legislation extremely quickly (hours), and then "translate" it from "legalese" into something that more closely resembled English. (One of my other intellectual gifts was the ability to take large amounts of information and summarize it into the points that were most important to whatever reader I was writing for.)

"Go with your strengths" is very good advice, because no one (not even gifted kids) is good at EVERYTHING. Certainly not me! For a supposedly "gifted" kid, there have been SO many times in my life when I have been totally clueless about VERY important things. Helps keep me humble.  

[franciscanheart]

I'm fairly coordinated, though not overly so, and can ride a bike just fine. I have problems, though, when people let their children or dogs dart out in front of me when I'm going 25mph down the road.

Maybe it's braking I have a problem with...

[dUSt]

I'm fairly coordinated,

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[franciscanheart]

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