The Joy of Fitness

I am not a successful athlete.  Currently I am in physical therapy to recover from joining a gym.  It seems that I irritated an old hip injury incurred when I fell from a high diving board onto the concrete below; did I mention I was in Las Vegas at the time?  What were the odds? I landed on my thigh and immediately following onto the back of my head; it is a sound I have not forgotten.  Everyone was so concerned about my brain, that they ignored my leg. It took about ten weeks for the three inch wide and twenty inch long purple bruise to heal. Each week, when  we went swimming at school, my classmates gasped. They were not surprised that I was such a klutz, just that the bruise was so tenacious.

One day while my husband and I were walking on the beach, he remarked that it was good exercise; this ruined the entire experience for me.  Exercise is not what I do.  Last year's gym membership was a nod to middle age and compliance, and look what happened.  I do not exercise, I live my life, but with illness and now injury, my life became too sedentary and too injured.  It also became concerned with the business of others' daily lives. I had to choose on what to use up my energy and it got used up pretty quickly.  Now that I have more energy I need to rethink what matters to me.

What has always mattered to me is joy.  Gym is not joy for me.  I can see that for some, athletics is bliss and I almost envy them.  I harbor no ill will for consistently being one of the last chosen for a team in school, I should have been; logic dictates the choosing of the strongest and most able first.  While I can be very strong, I am not very good at putting a ball where it should go, at least where it should go if you are following the rules.  I was delighted when my classmates begged me to be the "other" lacrosse goalie, since I could neither cradle the ball effectively,  nor did I understand the rules.  I could protect a small square of net, please them and solve all our problems; I became a sports heroine - once and only once in my life.

My kind of exercise involves heavy work in the studio and dancing; these day I don't do either one.  Most of my studio work no longer entails large scale woodcuts, two hundred pound stones or giant zinc plates.  I no longer have the opportunity to go to a bar, down a beer or two and dance for an hour, three times a week. I used to paint in my head while I danced;  It was pure joy for me and I noticed the people in the bars liked it too. When I dance and really dance, I become merged with the music; I escape.  I  probably get an endorphin high as well, but I could care less.  It is joy in all its' forms that pervades the experience; joy.

Who needs to run to nowhere, injure a hip and do clam shells with a rubber band around her knees when dancing is out there?  Perhaps when I am older, I can become that ditsy grandma who dances by herself and gets a million hits on YouTube; I just have to be sure to leave that big yellow rubber band at home when I do.