This is Western Coffee—notes on building the creative body. Last time: Form. The whole series is here. Please share this email; you can sign up free below.
First, some scenes:
Day 1. On Sunday, I rode my new getting-around bike from Brooklyn into the city for a class on meditation. The bike is a minimalist steel-frame single-speed that I picked up on sale, matte black, weighing 25 pounds. On the way home it rained like in a gothy Keanu Reeves movie, and the nearly puncture-proof but textureless tires I’d chosen slipped against the steel expansion joints in the bridge. Mental note: Avoid wet metal. Still, I banana-peeled on a subway grate outside my house and gashed my knee.
Day 2. After waking up at 5 a.m. and applying fresh Band-Aids, I ran to Central Park with some notion of a spontaneous marathon—and the expectation that I would train for three hours at least. However: My homemade electrolyte mix was over-concentrated and vile; New York was in the heart of the 90 percent humidity thing it was doing; the music wasn’t right; my legs protested so much that I scratched two hours in. This all left me in the distortive mood to parse 12 miles of running as a failure.
Day 3. To fit the training jigsaw puzzle together with enough downtime before a brief triathlon this weekend, I’d scheduled two cycling classes. One was at 7 a.m., and—inspiration striking gratuitously, as it does—I broke my all-time record for output in that class, which I had set when I was racing an Olympian. This is my all-out class, my edge for pure intensity; the outcome was delightful. Afterward I ran some intervals on the treadmill (cross-training!) and went home to work and recuperate for the evening class, where the teacher came over in the first minutes to say that because of a glitch I would not be in the games or on the leaderboard. The competition that night would be internal, self-motivated, and unsung. One of my essential beliefs about myself is, “You dance alone when you have to.” So I did.
Day 4. Ten minutes before swimming class, doing a face pull on the cable machine, I felt my neck seize up, bad. I got through the next hour of no-nonsense drills and strokes and kicking purely on the wisdom that movement helps these things more than stillness; and by breathing only on my right side. The run home was but a few seconds separate from a jog. I drew a bath and ate a $5 Whole Foods frozen pepperoni pizza, modernity’s great contribution to the life of the unemployed hyperjock.
Day 5. Recovery day, but I rode over gently in the morning to a new ophthalmologist (because insurance) in downtown Manhattan to undergo a yearly search for anomalies in my retinas, one of which once tried to detach. The doctor dilated my pupils to look inside, flooding me in brightness, and said my surgery from back then was “beautiful.” (Thank you, I thought.) With some time left before another appointment, I put on sunglasses that were not up to the task and walked my bike a few blocks south to the 9/11 fountains. Their strands of water raking down the sides toward center pits of unseeable blackness caught the garish sun and dazzled my defenseless eyes.
I’m writing about these experiences because this has been a week of magnified physicality, in ways reflected here and not, some of them quite difficult; but as I ran over the bridge on Wednesday, I felt the ecstasy of it in its whole color. It’s so easy to forget what it’s like to deeply know: We’re at a feast. This embodiment of ours, we have no (shared, objective, confirmable) way of understanding how it fits in to the broad truth of consciousness. But every indicator we do have, I would say, suggests that we’re each in the solitary and surprising duration of something gorgeous and faint, something that could more easily be nothing, whose momentary shape is the exception to eternity. However you taste of it, whatever parts of it are sweet to you—I ask you not to wait. I ask you to adore it.
If you enjoy Western Coffee, please make a donation on my fundraising page for the nonprofit Achilles International, which is how I’m gaining entry to the New York City Marathon this year—my first. All donations go to the nonprofit and its work with disabled athletes; I’m paying my own race fees, etc.