I started this paragraph previously with simply the starter, “There’s only one part of my body that is not sore right now…,” but before I sat down to write anything else, I thought it a clever time to take a brief moment and pause, before I got started, and waddle my way down the hall to fetch a beer.
I waddle because my feet are aching. Right now, my calves feel like they are on fire. I believe the only words for how my back is feeling right now starts with the letter F and ends with something even a white-trash mechanic (if one were so present to hear my thoughts) would blush at the sound of hearing. I paused to grab a beer, waddled my way up and down the corridor, let out a grating sigh as I leaned down into the fridge and grab a beer. And as quickly as the sound erupted from within, like a flash of lightning (the way these thoughts come streaming into my mind), the thought occurred to me and the once quick blurb of an update that was to be was quickly transformed into the following discourse.
As I was saying, I think that the only part of my body that is not sore is the very tip of my nose. But this soreness is not to be chided. It is a good pain. It is a pain not unlike being beaten to a pulp by an enemy, but the difference is that the enemy is none other than yours truly. It is I, who tortured my being unto this point of ill-contorted stiffness. It is the same pain an athlete feels after a long arduous workout. I stiffly walk, huddle and hunch over in agony, but I feel much better about it than I would if I were attacked by group of ruthless thugs. This is perhaps because our body’s, when we exercise, shoot endorphins into the bloodstream (or so I’ve heard).
No, I did not go jogging or any other such nonsense or do some typical workout. I hurt, because I took a weekend away from the hustle and bustle of my normal existence. This weekend I was only on call to the sound of crickets as they chirped madly away in the cool summer night. I was only on call, as I turned off both of my phones, to the crackling and hissing sound of damp wood as I placed another log onto the flames. It was a weekend of sheer joy, a weekend of mental relaxation, a weekend away.
If you hadn’t guessed it yet, and I feel truly sorry for those of you who haven’t, I went camping over the weekend (Lord knows I have the bug bites to prove it). Chris and I traveled to nowhere exotic this weekend, as we have many times in the past, or at least to an area which you may have heard of before. We didn’t need to. As long as there is open sky, a place to set up tent and camp, enough to start a fire, and good conversation, then I am satisfied. And this is what occurred. Luckily, we had all the above (perhaps not the conversation—ha-ha) and enough beauty to visit to keep us entertained during the moment when there is daylight, daylight being a time when the magic of the campfire is ineffective (I find). It is because of this trip out there, plus the additional beginning of the trip sleeping on Chris’ loveseat that I am so sore right now.
Like I said before, what I am feeling right now is a good pain. And a good pain is something that can wake us and reevaluate our course without causing too much destruction, something which a harmful pain can bare upon us. It is something worth reflecting upon further.
Pain breathes the very essence of living. As humans, we measure our existence in divisions of pain. It often seems that we are only aware of our existence when we can reflect upon its’ sourness. When times are hunky-dory, no one reflects upon how fortunate they are, they live mindlessly as robots, programmed to continue on that same path that has brought them such fortune until a circumstance (a painful moment), often out of their control, reawakes them to rethink, to reflect upon, and change their present course to another in which they may fly on autopilot once again. When one induces that pain, like a doctor induces labor in a pregnant woman, the body, the mind reawakes on it’s own terms and out of that slumber a person can find themselves once again. Perhaps, like Rip Van Wrinkle, they find themselves a person who is a hundred years away from what they used to be the last time they awoke, the last time they were cut off autopilot. This is probably why so many men go through mid-life crises. Is it a coincidence that men, when they reach a certain age, are told to start exercising by their physicians (because they are not as young as they used to be), all of a sudden reemerge new selves after that first stretch of highway they trot down? Or perhaps women, who seem to be constantly aware of themselves, are such because society demands that they start training and working out (for aesthetic purposes) at so young an age?
There has to be some direct connection here, something worth diving into. Yet, as I look to the clock, a tool which I seldom used this weekend, it has rotated back into focus and it is late. The hustle-bustle world is once again calling for me, and I have accordingly turned my phone back on once again. As painful as it is, my body including, I know that once again I am slave to the beating rhythm of the minute hand that hypnotizes us into submission. It is the white noise we listen to in order to fall asleep. Yet, I also know true that the sooner I fall asleep once again the pain will abate. And so, perhaps sleep could do me some good as I am awfully tired and too sore to care whether or not I stay awake once again.

-sib-