pointless

I’ve traded in running for swimming at the gym lately. I find it’s the cooler alternative with less post-workout sweat issues while riding back to work in the 110 degree desert sun. Too, it soothes me. Maybe it’s the merciful near-weightlessness the water provides my body. Gravity stays on deck while I hang, limbs drifting, buoyed. Water rushing around me, lap after lap, I’m lulled by the rhythm and the rocking. My mind goes places, imagining a mistiness over a green, still pool. A cool, quiet dusk in a private lake, nobody around. Swimming is a full-body sport, and after sixty laps I’m spent in a way that running no longer spends me. Then comes my favorite part: hot tub Jacuzzi followed by steam room bliss. After, everything needs replenishing. I eat my normal lunch after I come back to work and my appetite is undiminished. Water can’t be consumed fast enough. My arms ache and I need a nap. But it’s a pleasant discomfort; the kind that attends great physical exertion. And the comfort of the water awaits me again tomorrow.

The only other thing that approaches the simultaneous pleasure, comfort, and woe of a long, hard swim is hiking a mountain or a treacherous footpath. The crunch of trail, the air free of exhaust fumes, sky and rock — it embraces and encourages the effort, pushes and pulls me on. Even so, I remain wretchedly subject to gravity.

There is no real point to this blog entry other than to take a break. I am stalling on the novel writing. I have a list of scenes to write, some of which are well-rendered in my head, but I refuse to put them on paper. No reason. Just lazy. Stubborn. Afraid. The process needs space and time (lots of time, apparently) and patience. I have to give myself up to it, knowing it won’t happen on my terms.