Work It Out

"I think I'll call it, 'the Roman baths of Caracalla,'" I said, referring to the club which Brittainy and I have recently joined. "It's like a Roman bath. Everybody does their gymnastics and sweats and goes to shower off, and there's a steam room and a sauna! Besides, it's the same kind of community thing---you get men working together and women gossipping 'at the well.....' and I'm pretty sure the most famous ruin of a bath in Rome is the Bath of Caracalla. It's a very nice ruin, too; all mossed over."

"Well, yeah," said Brittainy. "Though it's a little different in that gymnasiums were for aristocrats only, whereas here you have everybody."

"Hmmm. Funny, when you first started talking I thought you were going to bring up the clothes thing: i.e. people at Roman baths not wearing any."

"Well, there's that too."

Sometimes it feels a little brutal to work out right after we leave the office, then get up early the next morning and do it all over again, six days a week. However, it does mean that I finally have a consistent use for my ipod, and I'm getting actual pleasure reading time because I can only read books that I don't have to mark up while doing cardio workouts on the elliptical. The weights, naturally, are a different story. And this week I start yoga.

However, as I have long known about myself, I respond unusually well to regular exercise. Of course it is a principle (almost a platitude) that exercise makes you happy, but in my case I become miserable and even unbalanced when significant exercise is lacking from my routine. By the same token, I don't just become happy when working out consistently; I become stable.

As near as I can gather, my mind simply works too hard. It's wired like that, always running on something. This is a gift in many ways, but it is also exhausting and leads to problems like overanalysis and sometimes violent mood swings. When I work out, I force my mind to concentrate on purely sensory details of physical movement. The same thing happens when I go for a long walk in the woods or lie still for a couple of hours in the grass somewhere. Funny as it may sound, I relax by forcing my mind to stop making connections, posing problems, and generally processing information. People wonder at and praise me for extreme awareness of sensory beauty (taste, touch, feel, smell, hear, and see). The vast majority of them don't realize that for me it is partly a type of survival tactic.

When I can be still for twenty minutes contemplating nothing but the speckling of colors on a single leaf, or the soughing of wind in the trees, I come out on the other side as relaxed as if I had spent two hours getting a massage, or in a steam bath. Funny, isn't it, how God makes people? And it helps to work it out---to know what you are, how you tick, and how you can use these things to serve more effectively. "Know thyself" isn't such a bad motto, so long as it isn't your only motto. I like to couple it with "Fear God in life" (family motto since way back in the 13th century) and "Live to serve" (my dad's dictum).

So, work it out. How do you work?