I’ve been on a mission to reclaim my body.
Over the last several years I’ve allowed myself a
lifestyle of physical ease. I let my gym membership lapse. I all but forgot the
108 movements of Yang style Tai Chi that I’d learned and practiced over a
period of years. I indulged in regular desert binges, put on some pounds, and
even flirted with type 2 diabetes.
My only semi-regular physical exertion came during
the warm months when I regularly used my hybrid, 18-speed bike for getting
around. That was good for occasional sweats and keeping the muscles relatively
loose. But every now and then I’d find myself sprinting for half a block to catch
a bus. Painfully staggering is more accurate because propelling my 260 lb. mass
into motion was a challenge that my poorly maintained biological systems just
weren’t ready for. Invariably, having made the bus or not, I’d be a wheezing,
dripping mess for at least ten minutes, before my heart would stop its
hammering, and my lungs slow their straining.
Finally, two months ago, I joined a gym again, and
two or three times every week I’ve been enjoying strenuous, hour-long
work-outs. Yes, enjoying. More than in the past. I generally take to the
treadmill or elliptical device for a good 20-30 minutes and spend the rest of the
time on the weight machines. I work myself to a point of moderate exhaustion,
shower, and leave the gym feeling the drain and the challenge of it through my
entire body. It feels good.
To me, the wonderful part of it, and the part I’ve
come to expect because I’ve been through this cycle so many times through my
life, is the gradual but pretty quick return to decent fitness. After my first
workout, I was basically done for the day. My entire body throbbed or ached, I
had no desire or energy to do anything but lay in front of the tv. I felt so
weak. The next day I was sore and stiff and couldn’t have made it halfway
through another workout if I’d wanted to. But the day after that I was ready,
and so it began.
Just these few weeks later, I have my body back.
My workout is far more strenuous than when I started and I push myself harder.
My heart, muscles and lungs undergo a lot more stress and I come even closer to
a point of exhaustion. But as tired as I get, I no longer feel weakened after a
workout. Instead, I feel energized. The tiredness only lasts awhile, and two or
three hours later, I feel as though I could do it all over again.
It’s no surprise. It was a surprise the first time
I allowed myself to come down from a period of high fitness, after high school where
I’d been on the varsity football and track teams. I was shocked both at how
unfit I’d allowed myself to become, and at how quickly I regained that fitness
when I committed to working out again. This may be a surprise to someone who
has never lost then regained fitness, but it won’t be to anyone who has. It’s
all about the resilience. Not my resilience, or the resilience of any group of
special people. The resilience, I’ve come to believe, is just a characteristic
of the fabric or life.
I believe that because I see it everywhere. It
struck me in a big way when got my first youth service job, working with
serious offenders in a detention facility. My clients were 16-18 year olds who’d
been convicted of robberies and assaults, even rape and murder. They were
mostly what you’d call thugs, gangbangers, even sociopaths. But I soon saw,
because it was impossible not to see, that underneath the hardened exteriors,
they were also just kids. They laughed and played just like kids, like younger
kids. And they had the same sensitivities and the sense of wonder as other,
younger kids. It amazed me, but it doesn’t any longer. It’s that natural
resilience again, that seems to exist in everything that has life.
Have you ever watched a swatted fly struggle to
hold on to its life? Or a fish that’s been pulled from a lake? Howabout watching
a lawn in springtime come back from months under the packed ice and snow of a
brutal winter? A baby fighting to stand again and again, after falling over and
over? Are they all the same? I guess probably not. But they are all examples of
that ability to charge back at defeat, loss, setbacks, pain…to reclaim, retain
or regain something.
It’s like that old saying about never forgetting
how to ride a bicycle, except that it applies to everything. A forgotten language?
It will come back. Ability to play an instrument? It will come back too. Not in
an instant or overnight necessarily. But surprisingly fast. It seems not to be
a matter of character, or some special talent. It seems to be a feature of life
itself. We are resilient. We have the ability to come back, to recover, to
become again as we once were. I think
that we tend to deny this understanding because of the qualifier “as much”.
Because, of course I’m not as fit as when I was captain of my high school track
team. And no, I don’t remember as well as I once did. And no, Michael Jordan
will never again do what he once did on a basketball court. But this way of
seeing and not seeing, or accepting or denying, has to do with our obsession
with perfection, with superlatives, with what we think of as ‘the best’. But doesn’t that all miss the point?
Truth is, so long as we have life, we have life.
So long as we exist, we can create. And whatever we retain in our hearts, and
continue to desire and will, we can bring into being in our worlds. It’s one of
those things that age is teaching me.
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