I Used to Not Have a Choice

Article6 min read

Not much woodworking in this one. Fair warning. It’s the one I needed to write this week. Normal service resumes shortly.

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Most afternoons around two o’clock I make a decision, and I make it so fast it doesn’t feel like one. There’s paperwork on my desk. There’s a gym I pay for. I stay at the desk. The paperwork gets done, nobody is disappointed, and the day closes out fine.

I have been making that decision for years.

Here is the honest ledger. I don’t like exercise. I never have. I don’t expect to start. I don’t like the locker room, I don’t like not knowing whether I’m doing the movement right, I don’t like the part where my legs start to burn. On a bike I’m ready to be done at two miles. Hiking, two miles is about where my legs go heavy and turning back starts to sound reasonable. I’ve skipped camping trips with friends because I like air conditioning and I don’t want to lie in a tent listening to the woods. I turn down parties. I turn down concerts because of the crowds. It’s hot and humid, or it’s crowded, or it’s far, and I don’t go.

None of that is a crisis. That’s the trouble with it. Every one of those decisions is defensible on its own, and I’m a grown man, and I’m allowed.

What bothers me is that I used to do all of it without thinking.

I hiked Philmont as a Scout. Ten days in the New Mexico backcountry with everything I needed on my back, miles and miles a day, hail and thunderstorms and wind coming across open ground with nowhere to be but where you were. You didn’t get to opt out of the weather. You got wet and then eventually you got dry.

Then I spent eight years on the road. Genesis, McCartney, Def Leppard. Load in at eight in the morning, work until eight at night, then do the show, then take the whole thing down and drive to the next city and do it again. Five days running like that was normal. Some of us worked the night shift, cueing the show through the small hours so we could try to sleep in daylight. You slept on a bus, not in a hotel. It was ninety-five and swampy or it was thirty-five and sleeting, and either way the truck had to be loaded.

I wasn’t tough. That’s the part I keep landing on. I wasn’t disciplined and I wasn’t brave. I just didn’t have a choice. The gig required it, so I did it, and my body went along because it wasn’t being consulted.

At some point that changed and nobody told me. There was a first afternoon when I could have said no and did, and it went fine, and no consequence arrived. Then that became the new floor, and the floor kept rising, and now here I am at fifty six with a very well developed ability to arrange a life where nothing is ever particularly hard.

I’d like to be healthy and active into old age. Everybody says that. But I have to admit something else, which is that I’ve never felt the thing people describe on the other side of this. I was never an athlete. Band and theater, not sports. I have never hit a wall and gone through it. I have never had the runner’s high or the elation or whatever it’s called by people who have had it. So when someone tells me it’s worth pushing past the burning legs, I’m being asked to spend something I definitely have on something I’ve never once seen. My own evidence says it’s hot, my legs hurt, and then I stop.

And I’m not sure my brain is a reliable narrator here either. Three or four years ago I was halfway through a hike when my knee started to hurt. Not a twinge. It hurt. I decided I was being a baby about it, walked another three and a half miles, and spent the following weeks in rehab and the months after that being careful. I was not being a baby about it. So I can’t even hold onto the simple version of this, the one where the answer is always push. Sometimes the answer is stop, and I don’t have the instrument to tell which is which, because I never built one. Forty years in the shop and I can tell you exactly when a cut is about to go wrong. Forty years in this body and I can’t tell tired from injured.

A few years back I read a book called The Comfort Crisis, by Michael Easter. The argument is roughly that we’ve engineered hardship out of daily life and we’re worse off for it, and that the fix is to put some of it back on purpose. I liked it at the time in the way you like a book that describes you accurately from a safe distance. I filed it under interesting and went back to being comfortable. I’ve pulled it off the shelf again.

What I’m going to try is not complicated and not impressive. Cold showers instead of hot. Go to the gym at two o’clock and do the work. Get on the bike and keep pedaling after my legs start complaining and my backside is sore, because there is nothing physically preventing me from finishing except the conversation happening in my head. Mostly what I want is to act as if I don’t have a choice. That’s the whole trick as far as I can tell. For eight years the tour handed me the day and I did it, and I want to see if I can hand it to myself.

I might not. I’ve got a well-practiced move where I look at the thing, decide it’s not the day for it, and go do paperwork instead, and that move is smoother than anything else I do.

But I keep coming back to the same question, and it isn’t about fitness. It’s about arithmetic. If I have been quietly declining things for a decade or more, and every individual decline was reasonable, what’s the total? What’s on the other side of the doors I’ve been closing so smoothly that I never heard them shut? Some of it is probably nothing. Some of it is a party I would have hated. But some of it isn’t. There’s a trip I didn’t take and a hike I didn’t finish and a version of the last ten years that I didn’t get, and I’ll never know what was in it, because I was warm and dry and had paperwork.