The Daily Sweat

Salsa music erupts from the TV and I get lost in following the movements to a Zumba dance routine, sweat already gathering on my flailing limbs. I'm caught in the rhythms and melodies, stepping [mostly] in time. My only concerns are keeping up and not wearing away the lacquer coating on the wood floor.

Then I notice the mirror nearby. Every little bit of jiggle shows as I move. A list of all the recent junk food I've consumed seems to scroll by as I step and sway:
that strawberry rhubarb pie on Saturday
that Boston cream filled pie on Sunday...with the creamy pudding inside and the chocolate frosting outside (yummm)
the three choco-cherry brownie cookies and half a chocolate chip cookie today.

Some lifeless inner voice lectures me: if you ate more salad you could be all inspiring like the gleaming figures sweating on your TV screen, smiles plastered on as they effortlessly dance.


Then I'm aware of these thoughts and decide to take a swing at them:
Maybe if I was a gleaming perfection I'd be less inspiring.
Maybe what I am now and how I look now is no less inspiring than what might be or could be.

So I take another look - and I see a dancer, a woman sweating in a bra and shorts and not giving a darn if she's not tan and not perfectly toned.

And then I forget about looking. I place myself out on a gravel driveway on a starlit prairie night. The Latin music is floating out to me from the tall grass where crickets pluck their fiddle strings and fireflies dart in bright streaks of light. The breeze loosens whispering music from the treetops, and I'm moving because I can and because there's music and because it moves me.

And there's no body to me. There's no shape and there's no pinning me into one place. I simply am.

When I get to this state of mind in The Daily Sweat, it's like there's no limit anymore. I'm just lungs and sweat and doing and being.


It's a liberated state of mind.
It's a state of victory. =)