Sweat

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

The fields of athletics and creativity are well-quantified and researched, rich in validated methods for progress and improvement. Yet I rarely make reference here to that quantification or those methods. The reasons include that the drumbeat of incremental research can be misleading when we extrapolate it too generally, as is tempting. “You should eat breakfast after you work out to maximize the metabolic effects; no, before; no, we actually don’t know when you should eat breakfast because the study population was small and homogenous.”

But the main reason is that building the creative body, as I see it, doesn’t fundamentally rest on finding the best theoretical methods for accomplishing a theoretical outcome. It rests on the nature of your experiencing—on what it is like to be in your body as you move and as you create. Any method for advancing your embodiment works only if it can live inside you stably, rewardingly, over time. And the key condition—what it is like, for you, to be in your body—always eludes the measurement and reproducibility of science. It is infinitely and insuperably personal.

It is also—because all of us is—subject to the certainty of change.

Sweatsville.

For more than half of my life, athletics were generally bound up in my experience mainly with struggle; and the struggle far overbalanced any reward. This changed when, by a chance impulse of the heart, I rode my bike at sunset on the beach in Los Angeles. Suddenly the experience of riding a bicycle was identified with pure pleasure. It fulfilled no obligation. There were no benefits. It was just the thing that in my purest bedrock motivation called to me in the moment. When I had gotten a taste of what was possible in that act, I wanted more. The motivation led to physical conditioning which led to greater capacity which fed into the original desire and gave it greater scope; these things formed a virtuous sequence.

Then things got muddy, because I caught (in the traumatic vulnerability that came after my first big bike accident, when I sat around on opiates for a few weeks and lost some weight) a whiff of what it might be like to shift myself toward an ideal, of thinness, that I had picked up from pathologies of body image that run everywhere in our culture and seem to find certain specific resonances among gay men—and became compulsively drawn to that, which led to self-restricted eating and strictly regimented exercise and then, when other stressors entered the picture, the dissolution of all of it and a banishment into overindulging self-harm.

The process of recovering from all those imbalances took many years, and in speaking with a friend this week about some of the issues I’ve raised here, I realized that sometime in the indefinite recent past, the external parameters by which I had judged my physical efforts had largely melted away—that the “shoulds” which so thickly surrounded my athletic practices in an earlier phase had lost their force. It’s not that I don’t care at all how I look or what I’m doing to sustain my long-term health; but these pale, quite frankly, next to the joy of embodiment that I feel in my experience of yoga, strength training, swimming, cycling, and running—and everything else my body does with the support of those practices. The departure of the “shoulds” makes sense, upon reflection: In March 2020, the world got ripped down to the studs and I was left in a newly stark relationship with myself. Then, for the first time—through creating, through movement, and especially through the quiet acquainting of meditation—I made that self into a friend.

The topic today is supposed to be sweat. I used to be embarrassed by how much I sweat (I sweat a lot—but like, a lot), and it’s symbolic: Entering the alien scene of athletics invoked a state of shame, a shame physicalized in the form of sweat, public and undisguisable and gross. But among the greatest freedoms and powers of being human is the freedom and the power to invert our own experience of an external fact even as it remains constant; so that sweat now for me is the product of delighting in this body, of inhabiting it urgently. Sweat is a precious artifact of the self-befriending. I didn’t choose to change my experience of sweat; that’s a by-product. But the friendship was a choice.

Coming Friday: Truth.

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