The Spirituality of Iron
For all my life, I’ve loved two thing consistently: physical activity and creative self-expression. Professional sports, team sports, individual sports or solitary training, it doesn’t matter. Creative writing, philosophical truth seeking or heavy metal, it doesn’t matter either. I love it all. I trained and competed in mixed martial arts for twelve years while maintaining this site. I’m watching basketball games wearing a Slayer t-shirt on any given night. I’m that guy.
That always elicited two particular reactions out of people: a) I’m a walking contradiction in their eyes because I know how to throw a punch and I’m actively interested in Pasolini movies. b) I'm understood to be a fake. A tourist who’s necessarily into one thing more than the other and taking casual interest in something outside his comfort zone. Both of these perceptions are wrong. Because both of these fields of interests are not necessarily at odds.
Since I don’t have to defend my arts & pop culture credibility on this site, I want to tell you today about my love for physical fitness and how it improved my mental health and nurtured my intellectual endeavours. I’m not trying to sell you supplements. Bear with me.
Ground Zero of Agency
I’m the youngest of two children. For me, part of growing up and becoming an adult consisted in reconciling myself with the idea of not being the youngest anymore. Taking this psychological step seems self-explanatory, but I suspect a lot of people struggle with it. You’re a kid for all your life and people don’t take you seriously because you’re a kid and you have all the time in the world until you don’t anymore. When it comes at you, reality is fucking merciless and it will come at you.
For a lot of people of my age (I’m what you call an old millennial), realizing that you’re just another tax paying schmuck like your parents can be paralyzing. We’re a generation raised on artificially boosted self-esteem, believing that wanting was enough to unlock the secrets of the universe. Rhonda Byrne be damned. Millennial didn’t need The Secret in order to feel entitled to the greatest things life had to offer. Our new age psychology driven parents were more than enough to sell us this mindless pipe dream.
If you go to the gym, lift weights and run on the treadmill, you will witness one important thing: change. Your body will slowly turn into a map of your efforts and sacrifices.
Few of us recover make it out of the cutoff point spiritually alive. When you finish college, get an entry-level job and start paying bills, your soul gets a brutal beating. You realize that you don’t have control over anything. That you’ve walked into a soul-eating trap. That’s how I ended up in the gym. I never wanted to get buff. Maybe shredded like Bruce Lee, but it was not the reason why I paid a membership fee to a physical fitness institution. The reason was simpler: I had some poison to let out.
What I’ve discovered in the gym is that it is a degree zero of agency. If you find yourself in the gym, it is because you’re physically and financially healthy enough and that you’re still in control of the most important thing you own: your body. Not everyone has these privileges. Whether or not you want to get buff or not. Whether or not you want to get slim, it doesn’t matter. If you go to the gym, lift weights and run on the treadmill, you will witness one important thing: change. Your body will slowly turn into a map of your efforts and sacrifices.
That change will engender meaning. Depending on what your objective are, you will also either become bigger, stronger, tinier, more fit, etc. I’m not saying that it is necessarily the desirable outcome, but your body will gain perks from all that time invested on it. Whether you find these perks to be desirable or not is entirely up to you, but they will be your own doing. It will have happened because of you. Because you’ve invested time and effort. It will fend off the meaninglessness of life. That itself will keep bringing you back because you control one thing now: your self.
Self-Awareness and the Body
Contrary to contemporary perception, pursuits of physical fitness are not superficial. Of course, it’s a choice you make and not making it doesn’t make you any less of a human being. Also, everyone has a different body type and however the level of effort you put on your body, you cannot change your body type. For example, I’m an ectomorph, which means I’ll forever have a hard time to put on muscle. Some people are mesomorph or endomorph and results will always happen within the frame of your body type.
Alchemy can only transform elements of a same nature and not transmute different elements.
My point is: once you start putting effort on your body and that you do this FOR YOU because you’re tired of feeling meaningless, something happens. Your soul starts changing. You become a little prouder. You understand how to exert change in YOU and YOU are the only thing you control in this world. You start controlling the message and start caring a little less about how it is received because you know in your heart that you still have the alchemical forge that is the gym and that the fire of transformation burn bright within your heart. Your body and your soul are synchronized.
For years, I thought that shirtless mirror selfies were the douchiest thing in the world. They are still very criticized to this day, but I understand now why people are taking them. They are proud. It is a reflection of the work they’ve put into themselves. My example here is centered around the gym, but it could be a video of someone doing a soccer trick shot or TikTok of dancer doing amazing things with his or her body. It’s a testimony to time spent working on creating something.
If you know the way broadly, you will see it in everything, said Miyamoto Musashi.
Working on your body the most simple straightforward way of exerting change into the world and when you do it, two things happen: a) You start gaining confidence. Not because you necessarily feel more attractive, but because you don’t feel meaningless anymore and you have hard evidence of that b) You start investing yourself in other pursuits, might they be physical of creative. Because you have now a method to exerting change upon the world. You’ve started with the only thing you own and you’ve moved on to exerting change on others.
I don’t claim to understand much in life, but I do understand this. I am not a contradiction. I am not a fake either. I have found the spirituality of iron. I have not set a foot in the gym since the pandemic took my neighbourhood iron pumping temple, but it doesn’t matter. It now reflects through body weight exercise, soccer, running, creative writing and that very site. If you know the way broadly, you will see it in everything, said Miyamoto Musashi.
It’s a choice you can make too. It is prerogative to make it and I won’t think any less of you if you don’t. But whatever you choose, don’t shit on the person that chose differently because you don’t understand the spirituality of their choice. Gleefully do what you do like Ernest Khalimov gleefully lifts weights. What I’m telling you today is that I do both gleefully and that it helped me become a better human being. A human being that appreciates people who gleefully do their thing.
