New essay in The Point
Wrote about lifting for The Point’s symposium on masculinity. The lineup for this issue, I have to say, is kind of brilliant: you’ve got a vaguely Dimes Square-adjacent novelist, the world’s foremost family abolitionist, the guy who makes fun of people’s ties on Twitter, etc. And me!
Some excerpts — but you can read the whole thing, and really the journal itself is worth subscribing to (I do so):
“Exercise is a way to react—continuously, generation after generation—to the fact that our society is both complex and leisured enough that many workers can sit down all day, a fact for which we have never forgiven ourselves”
“I have never quite figured out what ‘mindfulness’ is, but I know that I am the sort of person who is held to benefit from practicing it. Unfortunately, precisely because I am this kind of person, meditation makes me angry”
“I had always avoided the big compound lifts—the exercises that involve many muscle groups working together simultaneously. In addition to all the other things I dislike about myself, I am clumsy. When my anxiety is properly medicated, my clumsiness is worse. So I thought that if I did, say, heavy squats or dead lifts, I was likely to hurt myself or someone else. It turns out that this is actually a good reason to practice big, simple movements that involve the entire body, such as the squat. In addition to training your muscles to handle more weight, you are also training your nervous system to monitor and control all those muscles at once. In other words, it is good for an uncoordinated person to practice coordinating”
“‘My strength is made perfect in your weakness,’ wrote St. Paul, who did not realize how much happier he’d be if his squat strength went up”
“Weakness and strength are systole and diastole, to borrow one of Emerson’s favorite metaphors”
“Finitude is not much to trade for the privilege of existing on this planet”