Finding Muscular Possibility and Radiant Energy at the Gym

It's been about five weeks now since I left my house in the dark one morning and drove to the gym down the road. It wasn't that exercise was new to me; it was that I was used to doing it alone in my house. Dance and ball exercises in the morning. A walk in the afternoon. Enough cleaning each day to count for something.

But at the gym I have, as I have said before, encountered community—women and men who come together for the purpose of pressing up against their own limitations. Together we struggle, together we overcome, and when we can't—when we cannot go round three of the bicep curls, when we can't adapt to the new samba step, when we have to relinquish our eight-pound weights for the five-pound weights mid-way through the tricep thunder, we are not in the business of judging the other. There's something so brilliantly non-verbal about all of this. Stories that don't require words.

I wanted, this morning, to say something about the women who lead these classes—women for whom I have enormous respect. I wanted to talk about how it is to wake up to radiant energy—to borrow another's until it settles in as one's own. I find, today, that I don't have the words. Maybe there aren't words for this body thing. Maybe there's only thank you.