Insufferable

This is Western Coffee—notes on building the creative body. Last time: Instruments. The whole series is here. Please share this email; you can sign up free below.

I wish I could tell you that, from a deep well of spiritual cultivation, I triumphed over the minor inconvenience of an unpleasant cycling class this week. But I did not. I hated every second of it. The equipment for the games that drive this format—the reason I trot off to the gym for cycling in the first place—wasn’t working. The substitute instructor’s mic level was so painfully high that I draped a towel over my head to try to shield my ears. A young woman surged toward me at the studio doorway and told me I looked identical to her friend’s brother and asked if we could take a selfie so she could text it to her friend, though he would not agree there was a resemblance. Sweatily I assented.

Grounding rituals are susceptible to invasion by minor nightmare. Not “my foot is on fire” or “the dog didn’t ever come in last night” nightmare, I’ll grant you—but then, just as suffering is relative in general, the things we find insufferable usually aren’t yoked to any objective measure of severity. Suffering is related to interior tolerance. Some things exhaust that tolerance faster or more completely by their nature. But they don’t have a monopoly.

This Balthazar donut was not insufferable.

There’s a lot of intelligence to be harvested from disquiet, from what gets to us. I have written here and still think about the time when an end-times thunderstorm opened on the wholly unsuspecting populace of New York City one Sunday afternoon. How did you react when that happened? my teacher asked as we sat down for the start of yoga class. “This is information about your temperament.”

Information about my temperament arrived in a steady flow the other night as this well-meaning cycling teacher shouted in the dark. It included a real-time recognition that my suffering was a product of an internal process. I found that I could not reverse this process in the moment, but could abide it. And this in turn altered the outcome from what it would otherwise have been: I finished the class. And then I came home, and ate nachos.

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P.S. My friend and reader Cyrus sent me this warm, fluent, humane conversation between Ezra Klein and the music producer Rick Rubin about experiencing and nourishing creativity.

Kindly send me your thoughts, questions, and provocations: dmichaelowen@gmail.com. And say hi on Instagram, or let’s Peloton together: @leggy_blond.