Hearing "The Other Side"

There are two things I hate more than anything else in the world, which are more related to each other than they might at first seem: stretching, and hearing the other side of things.

There are two things I hate more than anything else in the world, which are more related to each other than they might at first seem: stretching, and hearing the other side of things.

This has been my work this year, it would seem, a work I never really wanted to do before and maybe could not have done until I understood I had no choice.

Well, of course, you always have choice. You can stay inflexible and let your aging body and tired mind ossify into limited ranges of movement and perspectives and be just fine, really. Really, unless you want to do or know more, in which case you have to make that other choice.

This year’s been that other choice, and I’ve been kicking and screaming against each new expansion, groaning and growling bitterly against the delicious and terrible pain just past the boundaries of comfortable and safe.

My gym is a training gym, by which I mean not that you are training for something but rather that you are assigned a trainer who designs, supervises, adjusts, and shapes your training. I never wanted this kind of gym, as I’d rather just go it alone and not be bothered and therefore fully responsible for torn joints and tendons. That’s what I did during the three years previous in other gyms, and that was just fine, but of course it really wasn’t. Because actually I wanted something more, and wanted to do more, and that hurt to say more than tearing my shoulder or throwing out my lower back.

My previous trainer, who was the first trainer I ever had, was a former soldier. That was more fortunate for him than for me, because I think it gave him enough patience to smile when I repeatedly cursed him each time he made me do stuff I didn’t want to do. I really hated him for those planks, especially, and even more so after he added another 8 weeks of them onto the next program. He’d been in war zones, so I guess I was a little easier for him.

Of course, the fucker was right. I needed those, and needed to stop doing all the other things in the gym that I was actually good at so I could actually get stronger. He’s gone now, and I’ve another, and though I don’t think she was a soldier I also don’t growl angrily at the really hard stuff she makes me do because I now realise I actually want it.

Today she gave me a new program, the first half of a split body plan, and I laughed excitedly at how much of it hurt like hell, at how much pain I know I’ll be in the next eight weeks. The four weeks after that of course I’ll feel confident and strong and amazing until she throws another plan at me and I’m back discovering how many more directions there are that my body doesn’t yet know in which it wishes to move.

I say I hate stretching, but I’m not actually stretching in these routines. Instead, I’m just learning to move heavy weights in directions my body doesn’t yet move them, but now I actually have to learn to stretch to make those movements. My hips are locked liked secrets, my hamstrings are more like oaks than willows, and apparently my shoulders still haven’t figured out that I don’t need to carry the weight of the world on them.

So now I have to stretch all that, and I hate that. I hate that because I need it, and I hate admitting that I needed to do something for a long time that I didn’t do.

Which is exactly what hearing the other side feels like.

Back in late March, I guess, with my very first dispatch here, I wrote about doing some ideological “spring cleaning.” I’m amused to notice it’s also the same week I started this new training gym. In fact, it’s not untrue to say that From The Forests Of Arduinna and this new iteration of body work are part of the same project.

In this gym, my body attempts to inhabit new spaces and new movements, pushing and pulling heavier things around then it ever dared before to do. In these dispatches, my mind and soul try to unravel knots and embody contradictions which they never let themselves consider.

This has been just as hard for me, and I’ve hated this work just as much as I’ve hated the gym work. Which is to say I’ve also needed it, and hated to admit to myself how much I needed to look at these things.

Minds can get locked as much as hips, become inflexible, unyielding. Without daring other perspectives, without so much as considering “the other side,” thought rots and ossifies.

I think of this particularly when I consider how I’ve forced—and it really felt like self-coercion at first, just as those fucking planks did—myself to at least read intelligent perspectives that I completely disagree with. That’s ultimately how I finally came to admit there was something wrong with the woke stuff, or the problems with gender discourse, or with Antifa.

Of course I suspected something might be wrong, just as I also suspected that maybe I could bend a little farther towards the ground or pull my shoulders back a bit more. I always suspected that, but I also never really tried to find out what my suspicions meant.

I needed to look at that stuff, but that meant loosening my grip on some ideological certainties I thought I needed more. Those certainties are exactly the sorts you hold onto in your body, surety of movement past which you do not try for fear of setting things awry.

It’s okay for things to go awry, though, and certainty is only helpful to a close point. Farther and further from that point is a lot more life and wisdom, but since experience never mapped that out for you, you don’t really know where you’re going.

I’m thinking about this all particularly right now because I’m pretty sore at this moment. My deltoid and brachialis muscles are cursing at me like I used to curse at my trainer, and there’s nothing to do but rest them until I go back for more pain.

I also just read a difficult accounting of the Kyle Rittenhouse events in the United States, which I thought were pretty clear-cut but apparently aren’t. As with my back and arm muscles which I thought I understood but didn’t, what seemed to be a clear act of “white supremacy” in action may have just been a stupid kid reacting to violent (and let’s remember, also white) assholes in a moment of absurd chaos. As with accounts of rape and coercion by trans women, our tendency to reject any account that does not square perfectly with our ideas of who are automatically victims or to discount counter-evidence that might prove the “other side’s” point is really untenable.

I am also sore because of something else, or maybe just sorrowful. I’ve never written about this, but this kind of stretching cost me quite a few people I considered friends. Some came back around, but to a larger portion my questioning of these new orthodoxies signaled an unforgivable apostasy which turned me from friend to unwitting foe.

Were they ever “real” friends? That’s not a question I could possibly answer. For some I think yes, yes we were. For others, I’m not so certain. Regardless, it’s a sorrowful thing, or better said a sore thing.

Working out makes everything sore, though, and stretching always involves a feeling of pain. It isn’t just something you have to “live with” or “get through,” but is itself crucial to the transformation.

And transformation, in the end, is why we do any of this.