Writing is like fitness, and vice versa

“Okay.  Your kids are climbing into the cereal box.  You have $1.25 left in your checking account.  Your husband can’t find his shoes, your car won’t start, you know you have lived a life of unfulfilled dreams.  There is the threat of a nuclear holocaust, there is apartheid in South Africa, it is twenty degrees below zero outside, your nose itches, and you don’t have even three plates that match to serve dinner on.  Your feet are swollen, you need to make a dentist appointment, the dog needs to be let out, you have to defrost the chicken and make a phone call to your cousin in Boston, you’re worried about your mother’s glaucoma, you forgot to put film in the camera, Safeway has a sale on solid white tuna, you are waiting for a job offer, you just bought a computer and you have to unpack it.  You have to start eating sprouts and stop eating doughnuts, you lost your favorite pen, and the cat peed on your current notebook.

“Take out another notebook, pick up another pen, and just write, just write, just write.  In the middle of the world, make one positive step.  In the center of chaos, make one definitive act.  Just write.  Say yes, stay alive, be awake.  Just write.  Just write.  Just write.”

Natalie Goldberg wrote that in her amazing book Writing Down the Bones.  Yes, it is about writing, but it might just as well be about working out.  There will always be reasons not to work out.  There will always be things, big and small, that want to take our attention away from our healthy practices.  They will still be there when we are done working out and we will be better for having taken care of ourselves.