“Bodily vigor is a moral agent, it enables us to live on higher levels, to keep up to the top of our achievement…(the body’s form) could be altered and perfected, and implicitly, their afterlife.” Dr. Luther Gulick, head of physical education at the Springfield, Massachusetts YMCA where basketball was invented in 1891.
I’ve never been a good athlete, though I do love sports. I played junior varsity baseball, ran long distance in high school, and played pick-up basketball from childhood into my late 40s. But, ultimately, I didn’t have the body type or the determination to excel on the playing field. But, starting in my late 50s, I’ve been more dedicated to weight training, cardio, and overall fitness than any time in my life.
“Life” is the operative word, since it is the absence of life in dead friends that’s driving me. Every bead of sweat. Every breath. Every sore muscle. Every rep. Every bit of exertion is a testament to being alive and, in my mind, a tribute to those who are no longer here. The deaths I’ve experienced in middle age have made life precious in ways it never was before.
Between January 2018 and January 2021, eleven men I knew either very well or for several decades died. In the wake of their exits from the world I’ve thought a lot about them, what they taught me, and about mortality, particularly the older men who served as aesthetic or lifestyle role models. I think of these mentors and peers when I bench press, do a squat, or some HIIT workout I found on the internet. For a mourning man in his 60s, this isn’t about getting “cock diesel,” but making the years – the months, the days, the seconds – I have left a little fuller, a little sweeter, and definitely active. When I had a high blood pressure diagnosis a year ago I stopped eating red meat, changed my workouts, and replaced hot chocolate and chai with matcha. Since then I’ve lost twenty-five pounds. Adapt or die is not a slogan. It’s a lifestyle decision.
I’ve always loved sweating. From when I ran track in my teens to my diligent yoga years in the early ‘00s, the taste of my body’s liquids on my tongue after its poured out of my skin always brings me pleasure. But in the last few years that moisture has become even more precious as a sign that I am alive, that I am present in my body, that blood still courses through me and that, at those moments, I’m as vital as I have ever been and ever will be.
I’m not a religious person. I’ve never had much faith in dogmas, hierarchies, or the many rules of religious engagement. But I have always found spiritual pleasure and ecstatic release in moments when you transcend this plane of existence. I’m a not a hard drug user. Rarely do I smoke herb. Never have a tried coke or heroin. I did angel dust once alongside a pal mourning the death of his mother and, for my act of fellowship, was rewarded with a splitting headache. I did ecstasy once, stayed high for two days straight, and never did it again, fearing for my brain cells. I have, against my doctor’s advice, become a fan of cigars, especially Cubans and high-quality Dominican brands, but I smoke, at most, once or twice a month, and then usually with friends. Cigar smoking is as much an act of fellowship as nicotine desire.
A great piece of art — Stevie Wonder’s ‘Innervisions,’ Krzysztof Kleslowski’s film ‘Blue,’ the large murals of Kerry James Marshall, an August Wilson monolog performed by Rubin Santiago Hudson, Aretha Franklin’s voice in ‘Amazing Grace’ — can raise me up to the heavens. Those are external stimuli that shake and rattle my third eye. But there’s another connection to the divine that can only be experienced through movement that pushes the heart and clears the brain.
Sweating – be in the gym, the yoga mat, or having sex – is, in my mind, a connection to the most elevated mind and body union. With time, and diligence, sweat makes me feel like all my parts are in harmony and the gateway to inner peace (no matter how fleeting) has been opened. For me, it also serves as a form of bearing witness to the fallen. I honor their essence with every drop.