two-stepping and walking in another's shoes/scarf

Yesterday's planned chemo treatment got postponed to today. (I guess the feeling I had over the weekend that I was hiking in the Rockies in WI wasn't my imagination). When I got this news, instead of heading home, I had my chemo buddy Jen drop me off at the CORE office part-way through a meeting I'd been hoping to Skype into from the chemo chair. It was great to see everyone in person and participate more fully than I would've been able to do. I realized I was doing what my Strozzi somatics training calls "two-stepping." The Two-Step is an exercise drawn from Aikido, and in it you take a couple of steps while reversing direction 180 degrees, and do it a few times, practicing finding your center each time you change direction. It's good practice for a sudden change of plans. We also shifted our staff meeting that had been planned for today to yesterday, and I opened it by beginning to teach Julie and Elizabeth the Two-Step!  It felt good to be able to access this internal flexibility, and to have the staff so able to meet me in kind. 

After an acupuncture treatment yesterday afternoon and some rest, my blood counts were up today (ANC of 880 yesterday, up to 1200 today!). The treatment went pretty smoothly and I'm feeling pretty good, and had some energy to work this afternoon after a nap. 

This morning I decided to walk to the clinic for my treatment (about a 35 minute walk) since my last-minute extra chemo buddy Mary Ellyn was going to meet me there and I wanted some exercise. I wore one of my stylish turban arrangements, and at the last minute on the way out the door I decided I needed an extra layer and donned the scarf my friend Nasra gave me a few weeks ago. Nasra is Muslim and had shown me how to pin an outer scarf neatly to an inner, tighter one to keep it in place. I didn't have time for that this morning, but as you can see from the selfie I took on the way, I think it looked a little bit like I was wearing a hijab anyway. 

I was walking past a lot of parents and their young kids waiting for the school bus, and, it might've been imagination birthed from my self-consciousness, but I think I saw people look at me with a mix of curiosity (mostly the kids) and a little fear or other discomfort, and look away more quickly and not greet me as much as they might have. It reminded me of an amazing anti-racism training I attended once that Cheri Maples and Barbara McKinney led, where one of the exercises was that during a bathroom and snack break, we each wore a sticker on our foreheads with words that were unknown to us. Some said "smile and shake my hand when you see me"; others said "ignore me", etc. (there were 3 - 5 variations, I don't remember them all). This morning I felt like I was wearing some words that said something like "politely ignore me and try not to show fear." 

I only made it half way to the clinic before removing the extra scarf (I got hot) so my opportunities for further enlightenment were curtailed, but it made me think that all of us non-Muslims should spend at least part of a day wearing a hijab. I'm not sure how Muslims would feel about this idea (I intend to ask Nasra tomorrow what she thinks) but I imagine it would be like the awareness exercises I've heard of where non-disabled people use a wheelchair or blindfold to simulate the experience of disability.

Also, maybe if more of us adopted this quite lovely fashion in solidarity, Muslim women wouldn't be quite so oppressed by non-Muslims' fear and hatred. Maybe I should have ignored the heat.