By Phyllis Brotherton
It sounded like a great challenge. I email the instructor to see if the class is too advanced for me, a just turned seventy-four-year-old woman with arthritis, but eight years of a solid exercise regimen. Maybe "regimen" is too strong a word, but a decent regular practice, three to five times a week, barring illness, injuries, recuperation from surgeries, a move from California to Nevada, and the occasional expresso martini lunch with friends.
The instructor assures me that all the exercises can be modified, as long as I could get up and down off the floor. I said I can do that, no problem, it just isn't pretty. All systems go.
Fast forward to the first class, where I take iPhone pictures of the stunning snow-covered Sierras from the third-floor classroom, also thinking, It's unusually warm in here. Forty-five minutes later, I'm lying on my yoga mat in a zombie state about to throw up.
"It's OK if you need to take a bit of a break," the instructor says to the five class attendees, four of whom have clearly done this before, so I know she's talking to me. The only thought racing through my head: Don't throw up. Don't throw up.
Picture an earlier scene: Standing, with hands on a chair for balance (thank God), we're to place a ball, slightly smaller than a basketball but more flexible, in the crook between the back of our knee and calf, squeezing it tight, then lifting the leg up into a donkey kick. Right.
My ball keeps flying out and rolling across the room. After four or five tries, running each time to fetch the ball, I give up and do plain old donkey kicks. The instructor sing-songs to the group, "It's OK if you want to put the ball aside and just do the donkey kicks. No shit, Sherlock.
I manage to make it home without upchucking, guzzle cold water, stuff a brownie in my mouth and immediately take a nap.
The next morning, my athletic, buns-of-steel wife asks if I'll go back to the class. I'm on the fence. Can I hack it? Should I hack it?
After coffee and toast with almond butter, sufficiently fueled, I return to my writing desk, and continue working on a flash CNF chapbook project, I plan to submit to a contest with a deadline less than two months away. Some days it's a slow slog, poring through a plethora of notes: on memo pads, in notebooks, on Post-it notes and my phone. I write and delete, revise and restructure, cut and paste. I ignore it, I stare at it. Other days, the words flow like ice cold water, crystal clear.
When stuck, I create diversion tactics, like counting the black tops in my closet (35), in varying sizes and life stages, and post this illuminating fact on social media. Or reply to another post about AWP, with a link to my 2016 Brevity Blog article, "First Timer AWP16 Debrief, or Notes from a Literary Lilliputian." Like a dork, I reread it and wonder, who wrote this? What happened to her razor-sharp mind and quick wit? I sigh, acknowledging that Literary Lilliputian still applies.
There exist fleeting moments of slightly more than mild despair. Should I end striving to write and publish the next brilliant, or even not so brilliant, but reasonably engaging book? I conjure up another Brevity Blog essay titled "The End of Striving," certain in those moments that I'm done; instead, planning to pivot, diverting my energies to volunteer work, learning to snowshoe, and tackling new recipes for, say, Asparagus Tart or Chocolate Chip Hamantaschen.
In her excellent book, The Forest for the Trees, Betsy Lerner writes, "The inner monologue [of the ambivalent writer] drums: I am great. I am shit. I am great. I am shit. But the writer with publication credits, good reviews, and literary prizes is not immune to this mantra either; in fact, the only real difference between those who ultimately make their way as writers and those who quit is that the former were able to contain their ambivalence long enough to commit to a single idea and see it through."
Properly chastised for my periodic ambivalence, I rule out "The End of Striving" essay or any thoughts of giving up writing, and decide to ditch Glorious Glutes class; great ideas, but a waste of precious cerebral bandwidth and time.
I shall forever be unable to do a donkey kick while squeezing a ball or perform a one-legged bridge. My glutes will remain inglorious, but able to execute the basic exercises I religiously undertake to keep physically functioning. Just as I daily commit this creaky body to my desk, glutes in chair, and focus on the latest writing project at hand. No matter the ultimate outcome, it will be glorious.
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Phyllis Brotherton received her MFA in Creative Writing from Fresno State University at the age of sixty-six. Her experimental/hybrid genre work is published in numerous literary journals, including Under the Gum Tree, Entropy, Anomaly, Pithead Chapel, Under the Sun, Essay Daily and Brevity Blog; has received two Best of the Net nominations, and won 3rd place in Streetlight Magazine's Essay/Memoir Contest. Phyllis is seeking publication for her essay collection, Creating Artifacts, and has two manuscripts sleeping in her lateral file, just waiting to be re-awakened with a kiss. She lives in Reno, Nevada.
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