I’m blaring Bussin in my kitchen, scrubbing a dish occasionally, but mostly dancing to Nicki Minaj. I do a lot of dancing in this kitchen. It is the only room in my apartment floored not with wood but with linoleum, which is ugly, but it doesn’t creak when I’m driving my limbs about, and I don’t have to worry about some stompy stanky-leg-adjacent action busting some wood floorplanks, so-- I tolerate the linoleum.
For most of my life I’ve also simply tolerated my limbs, which noodled through space on their own accord like overcooked pasta. I was clumsy growing up. My arms and legs did not give a damn about where I’d prefer they go. But tonight my limbs are snapping through space as if on worn grooves. They smoothly yank themselves through the air and fall crisply into place. The sun is setting, and the view of walnut tree from the kitchen window begins to dim. Instead a reflection slowly replaces the view. In the reflection there is my body and a lot of right angles, parallel lines, long limbs. I catch sight of some sublime ridiculousness, an absurd grin.
I’m not a dancer, and my dancing doesn’t feel like mastery, but it does feel like effortlessness. The gap between what I want my body to do and what my body does is so narrow that it feels like there’s nobody controlling the body at all. The body feels free.
It is a type of control is so embodied it feels as though the limbs are moving themselves, rather than my mind moving my limbs. For me this is a new way of experiencing the body. I’ve mostly experienced myself as a watchman trapped in the control tower of my head, busy tapping out morse code signals to my body somewhere far below. Tonight, though, the watchman is asleep and every tissue in my body is awake.
I credit this sudden felt liveliness to lots of hours of practice at the gym. Sometimes I question whether this truly is a wholesome activity and why I choose to spend my time like this. Vanity and boredom? Indeed, I first starting working out because I wanted to be hot. Then I realized that the strength and coordination made doing things like hiking up mountains better, which is very fun, maybe even more fun than being hot.
The practice of exercise made being a body feel better. It made doing all the things one does in a body feel better, which is to say: it made everything feel better.
All those hours at the gym, at yoga, on the trails, the hours spent coordinating the flesh, feeling my muscles, arranging them in space: they bring me closer to my body. Which is bizarre to say: how could I ever been separated from the thing that I am?
In those hours practicing movement, I gained, if not mastery over the internals of the body or mastery over the external weights, then at least competence. I gained a control so soft and suffused that it feels indistinguishable from freedom.
A slower Nicki song comes on, and I go back to scrubbing dishes. They are streaked bright red with the tomato-chile oil. I freehanded tonight’s dinner and it turned out delicious. It came together like Minaj freestyling: improvised, free, expressive, elemental.
I’ve poured more hours into cooking than I have at the gym, and gained some competence in the kitchen, too. I’m most delighted by extemporaneous meals like tonight’s. These meals don’t come from followed recipes, but from a series of partially remembered dishes, which have coalesced and recombined in memory, and bubble up like dreams. I can’t precisely recall when, or where, or if, I had ever learned to make the dishes I made tonight. I’ve been learning them all along. They came from pieces of remembered recipes here, bits of restaurant dishes I remember there, combined with minimal conscious effort. Hours of attention in the kitchen leaves you with a type of culinary knowledge so internalized that it is not experienced as a form of knowledge at all, but as spontaneous expression. It’s a type of cooking that feels a lot like dancing.
I have a lot of hours in this life. Using them to practice things I am not good at is often painful. I constantly re-justify them to myself: where is this effort getting me? Why do I stay with the practice of lifting, with the practice of cooking, with the practice of showing up every single day, with the practice of living?
Some might answer that practice and competence gets you power and control.
But it also gets you freedom. Control is an exertion of will; freedom is an expression of being. It’s white-knuckled perfection versus effortless flow.
To get into that flow, though, you have to put in the hours of practice. First you have to deepen the grooves, poorly rockette to enough Nicki Minaj tracks, scorch enough tofu.
On the other side is an easy freedom, one that flows like freestyle verse, like clear water over clean white dishes.