Working Out

When I joined a health and fitness club four years ago, I never dreamt I would develop more than just muscle. I have been running, both outdoors and on indoor tracks, for about twenty years now. I've done my share of 5 and 10K's; but as I grow older I lean more towards the controlled, temperate climate inside the gym. I don't run much any longer mainly because in the last three years I've found a new calling--group aerobics; it's easier on my knees and a lot more fun. The day by day routine of going through the warm-up, the aerobics and the cool-down affords me the opportunity to pay attention to certain lessons of life I never before thought of.

I've learned more intuitive methods of dealing with pain and injury, a natural side effect of working out. In the early days of my running career I would actually make doctors appointments to treat the injury and waited impatiently for the symptoms to subside. Now I have my bag of first-aid tricks: heat and cold, creams and over the counter anti-inflammatories and I know almost to the day when the pain will disappear. I also know where the injury occurred, in a joint, a muscle, a ligament. It's good to know these things so you can ascertain when a symptom can be self-treated or when it requires professional intervention. I can now carry these new insights into other aspects of staying well, like advising my physician to better assess a symptom.

I suppose you're wondering, by now, what this all has to do with Judaism and spirituality. By using physical training as a springboard, it drove me to think about other aspects of life that need to be worked out. The synagogue, for example, could be considered a gym for the soul. Rather than assuming that services are solemn ceremonies or dutiful worship, perhaps we can realize that they are spiritual workouts, to build the kind of muscle that connects us to God.

At the gym, I learned to expect more from myself. There are those days when I'm feeling tired or sick or both sick and tired, I workout anyway. I know that an hour of aerobics and some weight training will take care of my distress. I've learned to carry that attitude into other areas of my life. At those times when I feel I've reached my limit, physically or emotionally, I just keep on going. Life is not all that it's cracked up to be.  There are frequent disappointments; we need to develop muscles to overcome such adversity. It's empowering just to know you can do it.

In the quiet space of the aerobic warm-up, I sometimes wonder, “why not work out other aspects of my existence, my emotions for example”. I notice that emotional upset calms down after exercise. I soon discovered that as I confront the resistance offered by the cold, unrelenting weights and eventually overcome the limits of my biceps, I could face emotional discomfort, in the same way, and overcome that too. Emotional torment is like a barbell you carry around with you. It's heavy and hard to lift, but with practice the limits can be surpassed. One problem so many of us face is that we believe emotional setbacks will last forever. They don't, but by facing up to them, they soon start to dissolve.
It has occurred to me, more recently, that adults need some intellectual stimulation to stay in shape mentally. Perhaps the old adage, "use it or lose it" is making a comeback once again. There is medical research to suggest that mental warriors are less likely to contract Alzheimer’s disease; as an emerging senior citizen, this concerns me. I'm convinced that regular mental workouts preserve intellectual fitness enabling me to handle day to day problems more effectively.

My nose is often buried in a volume of Talmud, flushing out some of the fine lines of legal argumentation. It's like becoming intensely absorbed in a crossword puzzle or a chess game, but far more interesting. Enthralled from listening to NPR's Summer Series in Philosophy, I was reminded of old college courses and dug out an old copy of the Dialogues of Plato. It's much more captivating now than in my undergraduate days. I was stunned to encounter Plato's discourse of his memorable quote, "the unexamined life is not worth living". What better reason could there be for toning up the mind?

Jewish mysticism presents us with a paradigm of the universe commonly known as The Four Worlds. It suggests that our cosmos consists of four levels of existence which roughly correspond to the ancient elements of earth, water, fire and air. We, as a microcosm of that universe also exist on four planes: the physical, the emotional, the mental and the spiritual. Shouldn't fitness include more than just building muscle? Our current sensibility doesn’t allow for exercising other aspects of our lives. Isn’t it about time?