on loving the questions, and the radical act of unfolding🧺

Insecurity is the wellspring from which most of what I have ever done in life flows. Almost everything originates from my sense that I have no right to be thinking or feeling what I am thinking or feeling, that if anyone “found me out” the consequences would not be survivable. This is irrational, but so deep-seated and unconscious that it’s a lot of work to even recognize what’s happening, where the insecurity enters the water and starts to bloom like ink. Even my whole “fitness journey,” as it were, came from wanting answers, as I wrote at The Cut a few years ago:

I wish I could say that I got into lifting weights because I wanted to be strong. I wish I could say I had reached ultimate enlightenment and detachment from my corporeal form, that weight and size were nothing but numbers. I wish I could say that I not only didn’t fear being bulky but embraced and desired it; that I wanted to enter the room shoulders and biceps first because I only fit through the door sideways. In truth, I just wanted abs. I wanted to be a size small. I also wanted all of this to be easy… I was a runner for about seven years in hopes that someday I could run enough that my abs, and related self-assurance, would emerge… Instead, I was left with only the meager set of “good” foods I was allowed to eat and miles of cardio that kept unraveling forever, like a clown unspooling silk scarves from its mouth.

So as a person of insecure experience, I feel extra valid when a smart person of renown writes about insecurity, this unbearable intolerance for uncertainty and need for answers. This week, I read Experimental History’s 28 slightly rude notes on writing, where writer Adam Mastroianni referenced a passage from Letters to a Young Poet, where Rainer Maria Rilke encourages his penpal to “love the questions”:

“I am touched by your beautiful anxiety about life… I feel that there is no one anywhere who can answer for you those questions and feelings which, in their depths, have a life of their own; for even the most articulate people are unable to help, since what words point to is so very delicate, is almost unsayable…

if you have this love for what is humble and try very simply, as someone who serves, to win the confidence of what seems poor: then everything will become easier for you, more coherent and somehow more reconciling, not in your conscious mind perhaps, which stays behind, astonished, but in your innermost awareness, awakeness, and knowledge…

have patience with everything unresolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves as if they were locked rooms or books written in a very foreign language. Don’t search for the answers, which could not be given to you now, because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps then, someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer.”

As an inveterate answer-wanter, it’s been a whole project to “live with questions” in every respect, especially now, when answers feel so insanely available. This goes double for lifestyle stuff like eating and working out, which are the subject of literally endless tips and rebukes and “answers” online. Embracing uncertainty and our inefficient, inconvenient unfolding has never been a more radical act. I can tell you categorically that “everything happened” for me, not once I got my lifting and strength life all sorted out, but what happened while I was fumbling my way through it. There were overwhelming forces that discouraged thinking of my body and self as a question, versus a set of answers.

I’m quoting a lot, but it all reminds me, lastly, of this iconic Pete Holmes standup bit, from all the way back in 2011, when he asserted that “Google was ruining our lives.”[^1] Now, Google is ruining my life strictly in the sense that the results are dreck. But it stands that whole lives are lived and wives are met in the space of questions:

Anyway I’m about to embark on two weeks of travel and press. The next time you hear from me, A PHYSICAL EDUCATION will be finally be out in the world! I can hardly believe it. My shoulders have been permanently hunched for two weeks already, and every time I step away from my desk I find myself virtually hyperventilating, for lack of breathing regularly while I was sitting down. I have a case of too-many-questions disease, and we are hugging those questions, we are hugging those questions so tight that they pop! as a bunch of answers are rushing right at me.

Eat

~Liftcord Pick of the Week: “Patron saint of the Liftcord” Ilona Maher is covering SI Swimsuit a second time <3~

“I was not good at sports because I would not do sports because I did not have the body for sports because I would not do sports.”

I don’t know that you can truly “retrain your brain to crave movement more than screen time,” but reducing screen time at this point does ultimately involve some deliberate choices and actions.

I made these brown butter miso chocolate chip cookies; double the recipe and freeze in balls for fresh baked cookies anytime.

The dopamine cascade that this gives me: The live action reference for Powerline’s dance (AND the “perfect cast”) at the end of Goofy Movie.

Drink

Someone polled the internet about whether they preferred British singer Olly Mur’s before or after physique. Men preferred the “after,” but women preferred the “before.” After being accused of “lying” by men, women elaborated that that the leaner “after” represented a guy whose primary preoccupation, nay, obsession was with the gym and his own body, while the “before” represented more balance and self-esteem. Of course, of course, of course, we shouldn’t judge based on appearances. But to the extent that this might be correct a certain hyper-conservative segment of men who rigidly believe that no one accepts men who are not shredded? Sure, why not.

This counts as health because it’s about brains: AI has no idea what’s going on.

Rest

“Fascism: we hear this word a lot lately, but what is it?” —The incomparable Rick Steves.

The original sad-girl sensation: the Wild Woman of Butte, Mary MacLane.

cf. the recent Ask A Swole Woman, “It’s not a marathon or a sprint, it’s strength training”: Research shows it’s good to be good.

If you’re just trying to redirect energy from phone, here’s two reading projects: WH Auden’s social-media-viral (so I’m told) “great works” course, and a hundred Penguin Classics. (A fun project would be seeing how many Penguin Classics one could collect just from thrift stores…)

Related to the AI link above: Everything “good” about AI is just outright theft:

Sam Altman posted a short story it wrote. It went viral because, while the story was clearly over-written (a classic beginner’s error), there were indeed some good metaphors in there, including when the AI mused:

I am nothing if not a democracy of ghosts.

Too good, actually. It sounded eerily familiar to me. I checked, and yup, that’s lifted directly from Nabokov.

Pnin slowly walked under solemn pines. The sky was dying. He did not believe in an autocratic God. He did believe, dimly, in a democracy of ghosts.

That’s all for this week! One reader wrote to me this week to say “congrats on the baby! And good luck on the book tour. Man you're busy!” and I have to agree. Please help me un-hunch my shoulders and order the book.

I love you for reading, thank you, let’s go—

[F1] If you are a Pete Holmes fan, as I am, you absolutely must watch this all-time deep cut, "Accigone," from 2009. Trust me, just watch it. Seriously, watch it. "I don't know what you're hearing!"