I stopped playing tennis a couple months ago, which for me was no small thing.
I’d been playing a couple times a week for nearly two decades. Then, this spring, a few partners faded away, and I started to notice burnout, a distaste, so I decided to pause for a year or so, fearing I’d begin to dislike the sport.
But I needed to do something. When I was a teenager, I was pretty serious about rock climbing, so I figured let’s try again. I joined a climbing gym in the neighborhood. The gym’s multifunctional, with a co-working space, a good sauna, two areas for lifting weights, and I started adding some weightlifting and stretching at the end of my climbs.
And now I go more frequently to lift weights and stretch, and often skip the climbing altogether.
There were all the typical reasons: physique, flexibility, the benefits of feeling strong. But after a couple weeks it became surprisingly deeper than that. For context, I tend to struggle to slow down. I’ve been this way since my teens, but it kicked in big-time, early twenties, when I left the corporate world. Basically, there’s a voice in my mind, in the cave, that worries any minute unfilled—by reading or writing, or making money, or saying something nice to a friend—is a minute backsliding, slipping off the shelf.
And here, weightlifting helps. Doing something difficult, only one thing, and doing it slowly—kinda to my surprise, I found I loved it. And oddly, it’s music that got me there. At first, I lifted to the gym’s piped-in soundtrack. Then I tried my own music through headphones: hard and loud, the three-minute songs I thought I needed to stay motivated. But then—I don’t remember why—I put on a Brian Eno album one day, and soon felt like I’d fallen into some kind of trance. I lifted slower. I felt things more intensely: strain, release, different reactions in my body. I paid attention to the movements and didn’t drift, didn’t feel the yen to check my phone. Soon, the sessions became longer, drawn out, I actually enjoyed the whole duration, and that included the painful parts—especially the painful parts?—amid the somnolence.
To a point now it feels hedonistic sometimes to hit the gym, like a special treat.
From the poem “Focus” by Joel Brouwer
I knew many words but preferred to say
the same ones over and over, like
a photographer shooting four frames
of the same subject, hoping for one in focus.
It’s easy for me, on occasion, to fall into a feeling that I’m not really here. That living is dizzy and I’m whirling around. For some of my friends, meditation is grounding, or playing chess, or being in the woods—I’ve experienced those things, I get it. And yeah, of course, I’ll go back to tennis at some point. But for the moment, at least for now, my thing is to be sweating while synthesizer tones shift in my ears—to a point it sometimes feels sublime.
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Great new bluegrass from North Carolina (new to me, at least)
Recent works of social science I’m reading for pleasure
A racy Italian novel about the 1930s that was published in the 1980s
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What the what
“Meditations in an Emergency” is a weekly essay from writer Rosecrans Baldwin about something beautiful. Paying subscribers receive a Sunday supplement with three-plus things to love, plus the monthly “Humans Being Humans” ballyhoo.
Rosecrans is the bestselling author of Everything Now, winner of the California Book Award. Other books include The Last Kid Left and Paris, I Love You but You’re Bringing Me Down. His debut novel, You Lost Me There, was a New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice. For magazine articles, bio, contact info, blah blah blah, try rosecransbaldwin.com.