A girlfriend sent me this New York Times article by Arthur C. Brooks over the weekend. And I found myself shaking my head and thinking about my own attitude and how to live my life in a more hopeful, resilient, and mindful way.
(I'd post the article here, but there are probably some copyright laws against such a thing. So click over, won't you? And then let's discuss--I'll even open up comments on this for such a purpose).
“‘Go back?’ he thought. ‘No good at all! Go sideways? Impossible! Go forward? Only thing to do! On we go!’ So up he got, and trotted along with his little sword held in front of him and one hand feeling the wall, and his heart all of a patter and a pitter.”
I set out to choose this year’s resolution very carefully.
Because last year I casually tossed out the idea, to live with less stuff. And then casual became a luxury. And resolution turned prophecy.
Don’t leave in the middle of the night, she said to me.
As though I could disappear myself and all of my things without making any noise. As though I might.
In the end it proved a clunking, inelegant Houdini-esque escape--all fumbled chains and unpicked locks and taxi rides uptown.
And a very, very much stuff left on a small stretch of curb between Bleecker and West Houston.
So in November, as the year’s end drew to a close, I set about choosing my resolution very carefully.
And choose I did.
To love. To love and all its many iterations. An action. A discovery. To love and all that that entails.
But I would stake my life on the fact that words choose us. Not the other way round.
And so in the end there was another set of words, not louder, but more persistent.
To stretch.
To stretch and all that that means.
Which is, quite a lot, as it turns out.
Which is literal and metaphorical. Which is me sitting at my desk, limbs all akimbo, trying to work the kinks out. Which is kindness offered more freely. Which is trying new things and working a bit harder. Which is letting go more easily and asserting my worth even when its terrifying. Which is sitting in the discomfort and breathing through it.
Which is me, up twenty minutes earlier than usual each morning, on top of a foam roller, hoping to loosen the inflexible mass that is my back. Which is really me, on top of a foam roller, opening up the area around my heart.
Which seems exactly the point.
It may be that when we no longer know which way to go that we have come to our real journey. The mind that is not baffled is not employed. The impeded stream is the one that signs. | Wendell Berry
She had this laugh. I swear it’s why I married her, Laila, for that laugh. It bulldozed you. You stood no chance against it. | Khaled Hosseini, A Thousand Splendid Suns
When I make him laugh, I feel like the most beautiful girl in the world. | Drew Barrymore
Someone once asked, “If you could take it all back, would you?” At the time I didn’t know. Now I do. I wouldn’t take that terrible experience back for anything in the world. Too much light has come out of my darkness. | Susannah Cahalan, Brain on Fire: My Month of Madness
Of course I’ll hurt you. Of course you’ll hurt me. Of course we will hurt each other. But this is the very condition of existence. To become spring, means accepting the risk of winter. To become presence, means accepting the risk of absence. | Antoine de Saint-Exupery
And we drink our coffee and pretend not to look at each other. | Charles Bukowski
Child, to say the very thing you really mean, the whole of it, nothing more or less or other than what you really mean; that’s the whole art and joy of words. | C.S. Lewis
Not too terribly long ago Julie and I sat in a coffee shop and she told me about this idea she had: she would leave her current job and begin a small business. Julie is remarkable. Smart, tenacious, and a huge advocate for women--for women doing what they want, even if is hard and terrifying (actually, especially then).
fitBallet is an exercise regimen designed to strengthen and empower women. I've taken it twice now and I'm not going to lie: it's hard. But that's the point. That's why it's exciting. Because at the end of the class, with shaking legs, I walk away knowing I did something that demanded I try a little bit harder, and in a new direction. It's my new (favorite) Saturday morning tradition.
Julie wrote what follows a few months ago and it is one of the most exciting things I have ever read about women's bodies and why we should move them.
Let's go ahead and say something uncontroversial: most women have a complicated relationship with exercise.
This isn't news, right? If you're like most American females, you've grown up logging hours on cardio machines and bribing yourself with cute workout tops. You've swung between periods of obsessive dedication and overwhelming revulsion, the latter only ending when you feel massive guilt or the calendar ticks over into January 1st. You want to love exercise. And for small, endorphin-sparked moments in the middle of a kickboxing class, you do! But then, inevitably, it's the next morning, and the sour cocktail of exhaustion and resentment kicks in, and you leave your gym bag by the door.
Who's mixing the cocktail? Why do we so often view working out as an obligation we'd do anything to avoid?
One reason, I think, is that we feel our efforts are never-ending and a notch above pointless. The messages we receive--from the media, from other people--tell us that exercise is a vehicle to physical perfection, and that perfection for women means being as small as possible. Our "health" magazines focus not on building, but on taking away, whittling down. Lose fat. Trim your waist. Become smaller as a physical human being. Exercise, cast in this light, is a battle against a rising tide: get on your treadmill and outrun all the calories you took in. Don't let them catch up to you.
But even more damaging than this message is the one we're not receiving. Women are not given the important, motivating speech that is the birthright of most men: "We're expecting big things from you."
When it comes to fitness, women have long been the spectators. We don't need to grow up to be big and strong like the boys, because no one's going to ask us how many push-ups we can do, or how far we can run. No one cares if you can do a pull-up, but everyone notices if you lose five pounds. Is it any wonder that women center their attention on minimizing their physical footprint? But this constant focus on a "skinny" body obscures what the focus should be: accomplishment.
Women aren't taught to view their bodies as glorious machines, but that's exactly what they are. Nearly every physical feat a man can do can also be done by a woman. Do we have less upper body muscle mass than men? Maybe fewer fast-twitch muscle fibers? As a gender, yes. And now we're finished discussing the immoveable biological differences between men and women. They don't even begin to explain why men are pushed to maximize their physicality and women are encouraged to try for slim thighs. Add to all of this the elephant in the room: the survival of our species depends on us willingly undergoing a massive physical trauma at least once. Most women do it twice. With this kind of genetic legacy, why don't women think of themselves as superheroes in hiding?
Because you are. We all are. And those masked avenger qualities--speed, strength, the ability to leap tall buildings in a single bound--belong to us just as much as anyone else. It matters, in this life, that you push yourself physically. It is important that we be able to carry groceries over city blocks and support the bodies of our aging parents and maybe outrun a zombie apocalypse. Even if we're just sitting at a computer, it's crucial that we feel the particular afterglow of having recently hit our bodily limits and inched them forward.
And so, I think it's time to just call it. Exercise is not an endless race race pitting us against ourselves. Your body is for you. Whatever your personal goals are--lungs and legs that can run a marathon, abdominal muscles that can sustain a two-hour ballet performance, arms that can carry two children to safety--that is what you should work toward with the same fervor that you pour into being a success at your career, your relationships. Let's tell ourselves the truth, as it's going to be from now on: the gym is not where you expend the Recommended Daily Allowance of calories in order to gain societal approval of your body. It's where you go to polish and reinforce the temple in which you walk around.
To take a class, train with Julie, find out what it's all about this is the rabbit hole to fall down.
