Our house has this lovely, functional coffee table that we can’t get enough of. The thick slab of wood (shown in front of the couch above) has mega character and the steel hairpin legs were welded by a gorgeous southern belle somewhere in Georgia.

Needless to say it has panache and just the right amount of functional elegance to look good when entertaining, while also standing up to mega abuse from crafting and work.

Doesn’t mean I don’t curse at it from time to time.

Steel hairpin legs are a heck of a toe stubber. I was a tall girl young (my sister, now 6’1” had it even worse) and that meant my body always seemed to be longer than the brain could control.

This meant a lot of stubbed toes, and when moving at my normal pace (too fast), broken ones. I haven’t broken a bone to the level that I needed a doctor, but run into enough misplaced chairs and your toes start to lose their direction (the straight direction at least)

A fondness for pointy-toed pumps developed in high school, and never really left me. I always assumed I would wear sexy shoes forever, never thinking that those same shoes may put my feet out of commission in time.

Yoga toes to the rescue.

(For the uninitiated these are special toe separators that help spread and realign your toes, similar to the ones you get during a pedicure)

This isn’t a commercial for toe separators as much as it is a CTA for never giving up if you think you can’t come back from where you are.

Every time I stub my toes now, run into the table etc, I pop on my yoga toes and know that my feet are stretching back to some modicum of a normal placement.

I may never get perfect alignment again, but at least I am trying.

The thing with these spongy little toe separators is that they are undoing years of bad habits (those lustful pumps) while I’m just motoring around the house.

Where I used to just hope and pray good genetics would undo my ills, I now know that these silicone inserts can do just as much in half the time. (true story, my toes don’t naturally cram into a point anymore)

It makes me wonder what other habits in my life I am taking as concrete truths.

Could my short attention span, or bad habit of interrupting be swayed, even though I consider them ingrained?

Yup. they can.

Most things in life, whether bad posture, unfortunate work habits, procrastination, thumb sucking… you name it. These things can be fixed, the issue is it takes work.

You may not need hip surgery if you just do your bursitis exercises, but is a one-day outpatient thing better than the effort of taking an hour out of every day to do simple boring exercises?

The general culture seems to suggest surgery is easier but is it really? We always want the easy way out, or to just ignore the consequences.

What if we made a point to put on yoga toes to outweigh the ills of our cute shoes, or do those exercises to fix our hips so we don’t need surgery.

Sometimes all it takes is the effort and boldness to say, I am going to do this my way, a different way