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Learning to Walk

Why didn't I think of it earlier?

By Rebecca SharrockPublished 7 years ago 3 min read
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Developing the ability to walk and talk were two of the biggest milestones of my life. As I mentioned in a recent blog I recall practicing vocal sounds almost from the moment I left the womb. Yet the trickiest part was developing the cognitive ability to group vocal sounds together to form words.

When it came to learning how to talk, it wasn’t a process that ended as soon as I was around twelve months. It has more rather been a process that has continued throughout my life. The biggest learning curve was to initially speak my first words, yet at that age the novelty of vocal sounds and communication were enough to keep me motivated to practice. However, from that moment on, verbal skills simply built off each other.

Learning how to walk, though, was slightly different, given that I wasn’t practicing how to walk from the moment I was born. I’d see people walking around me. Though the sight was something that I simply took for granted at first. My parents and family members would carry me around, and walked in and out of my bedroom to attend to me. Yet, at that time, I just looked at people walking as movement around me.

All that was on my mind as a newborn child was being attended to when I was hungry and (especially) taking in the physical details of everything I saw. At that age, it never even occurred to me to physically get up and explore any curious objects that I saw. So walking wasn’t either a thought or priority for me at that time.

However, as a little more time passed by, I developed a desire to see a bit more of the world. So initially I learned to turn my head. Then from there the idea of more movement appealed to me. That’s when I taught myself how to roll over. Rolling over wasn’t too difficult to do by that stage. Also, after I performed the action I always felt a strong sense of satisfaction within me (much like an emotional version of having a good stretch). It must be added here that my desire to roll over didn’t come from me wanting to see more. The idea of that kind of action just came into my mind when I had reached the milestone age.

When I had grown a bit more and had developed the ability the sit up (which was a very similar process to learning how to roll), I became more interested about the action of people walking. While I observed this it occurred to me that walking enabled a person to get around by themselves and explore things that were further away. So at the milestone age I was suddenly struck by the idea of learning how to walk myself. As a very young child it was as if my feelings were saying the words of this blog’s subtitle “why didn’t I think of it earlier?”

Initially I began bottom-shuffling across the floor. Mum noticed this and was very pleased. She tried to teach me to crawl, but I didn’t want to do it. But once when Mum said “come to me” I managed to stand up but fell a couple of seconds later. I bottom-shuffled most of the way. Though a few times I took a few steps but then fell over. Shortly, I learned that if I took quicker steps I was less likely to fall over. At that time I was surely determined enough to use every bit of energy I could to keep myself walking.

After much practice I was able to effortlessly walk without ever falling over, and walking has become something which I now take for granted. I found that there was much less things to learn about walking as there were with talking (given that language involves many words, sentences and way of communicating). So the process of learning how to walk was much shorter in comparison.

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About the Creator

Rebecca Sharrock

I'm an autistic person who is making a career from writing, public speaking and advocacy work.

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