'The Zen of Sports' in The Artist's Way
It is a truth universally acknowledged that no one has ever made it to page 184 in The Artist’s Way, Julia Cameron’s book on how anyone can develop a creative practice. (If you have ever heard of writing “morning pages,” or having an “artist’s date,” these are the most well-known parts of the Artist’s Way canon.) I say this with respect, as an Artist’s Way head. I can’t say how many times I’ve cracked open The Artist’s Way; read a few chapters; notched a few days’ worth of morning pages and one artist’s date; then had to skip a day of pages; then neglected to plan a second date, ghosting myself; and before I knew it, I’d given up again. (Okay, it’s probably at least three, but not more than 10 times that I've done this.)
I understand this to be somewhat common for would-be Wayers, especially since I happened upon a blog post recently about how to do a “bare minimum” The Artist’s Way.[^1] But then I read Defector’s Artist’s Way book club posts, and discovered a bit all the way toward the end of the book that all of us lapsed Wayers have been missing by having no artistic discipline: The section on “The Zen of Sports.”[^2]
This section comes in the chapter on “recovering a sense of autonomy,” or “explor[ing] the behaviors that strengthen our spiritual base and, therefore, our creative power.” Cameron writes: “In order to effect a real recovery, one that lasts, we need to move out of the head and into a body of work. To do this, we must first of all move into the body.”
I flipped my copy open to these pages, eager as I am for anyone who isn’t a professional athlete to talk about sports. (I'm including my scanned and highlighted pages for paid subscribers at the end of this post.) It’s a little bit muddled: Cameron lists testimonies of physical activity—horseback riding, walking, bicycling from a handful of first-name-only subjects, and then also from Eve Babitz, who attests to being a dedicated swimmer. They all reach for descriptive words about the connection between their chosen sport and their creative practice: the horseback rider describes moments of intense feeling when connecting with nature, which teaches her the feelings to look for in creating; the cyclist is able to free-associate; Eve Babitz’s “rhythmic, repetitive [swimming] action transfers the locus of the brain’s energies from the logic to the artist hemisphere.” At the end, Cameron quotes the Webster’s dictionary definition of “exercise.”
It all skews a little cardio-heavy for me, which is not surprising; there are a lot of runner-writers who credit running with helping them write. Sometimes they specifically cite the fact that running is good practice for being in pain and discomfort for a sustained amount of time, which is how they also describe the process of writing. Unfortunately, we don’t have the time or space to redeem the running soul here. But I’ve always felt there is something to non-grueling cardio, walking especially, where bodies are occupied but brains aren’t. Taking a shower has a similar effect. My body is where my brain lives, much as Christianity would like us to keep the gross body and "pure" soul as separate as possible.
I spent a lot of time mulling over the differences and overlaps between running and lifting as I was writing A Physical Education. I wanted all the creative insight that was supposed to come from running that other running writers described. But my relationship with running overwhelmed the running itself, if I’m being generous: I was too preoccupied with calorie-burning and mile splits. But running also helped keep my brain in this sort of ruminative washing machine and in the cycle of experiencing pain, denying or pushing down pain, repeat.
Lifting, I admit, gives you very little mental room for noodling on your own little thoughts; your brain is too busy trying to do versions of “stand up again,” and then after each set, you are too gassed to do anything but stare into space while you rest up for the next set. At first, I did not like this.
But then, I would go to leave the gym after a session and realize I had just spent an hour thinking about nothing. Bliss! All that time I’d been giving myself “more time to really think,” but I actually didn’t need to think more. I needed a damn break. A nice concentrated dose of nothing.
Nothing is interesting, because it cannot advocate for itself except by proxy. But when there are way, way too many things to think about, reasons to think, thoughts and concepts and people I can’t ignore, nothing can be a gift. Cardio is like hiking up a mountain backwards watching the view the whole time, but lifting is like seeing the view for the first time at the top.
Casey Johnston
Eat
~Liftcord Pick of the Week: I neglected to link the short doc "Strong Grandma," on one woman’s journey to deadlift 100 pounds, last week. Prepare yourself. Just, prepare yourself.~
Does exercise fight inflammation or make it worse? Short answer: It fights fire with its own kind of better fire, unless you overdo it, which is probably not a problem you have if you have general inflammation.
The importance of pharmacies in rural communities, as rural hospitals close.
A 45-minute full body stretch. (And a 20-minute full-body mobility routine.)
The term you never knew you needed: “cereal mullet,” when you combine the forces of both nutritious and sugary cereals in one bowl (Cinnamon Toast Crunch plus Frosted Mini Wheats [or unfrosted], for me). It’s kind of stunning that there aren’t more cereals filling this gap. Why are all cereals either horse feed or a diabetic coma? Why must Special K Red Berries bear this burden alone?
A very strong recommend: Put tahini and miso and mushrooms in your lentil soup.
Drink
Two years ago, I went to Topanga Canyon, noted for its high population of unvaccinated people. I was there for all of three hours, and came down with what I later learned was (a mild case of) rubella, of measles-mumps-rubella (MMR) fame. This was confirmed when I got a blood test while pregnant a year later, and it showed I had high levels of rubella antibodies (rubella is very bad for babies, but this was not an active infection). I hung my head in shame as the nurse suggested, somewhat incredulous, that I consider an MMR vaccine. I don’t have my MMR vaccine? What? Whither my shots?
But I did have all my shots. Here is the thing: Nowadays, we give babies two shots of MMR as part of their normal vaccine schedule. If you were born between 1967 and 1989, though, you only got one shot. Born in 1987, I only got one shot. When measles was eradicated in the US, one shot was plenty of protection. But now that we’ve gone so far backwards in measles eradication, apparently it isn’t any more. Quoth The Guardian:
Previous vaccination recommendations took into account the fact that measles had been eradicated in the US, said Hazra. “All adults living in the US should be considered high-risk” right now, he says, and should receive two live doses at some point in their life. …
Dr. David Nguyen, an internal medicine and pediatric infectious disease specialist at Rush University System for Health, has a similar take. “If an adult received only one MMR vaccine before the recommendation for two doses was made, they should consider getting a second dose.”
In the absence of a formal CDC guideline for all adults, one thing is clear: two live vaccines confer lifetime immunity.
So I have two recommendations, if you were born between 1967 and 1989: Consult your medical professional, and for god’s sake, don’t go to Topanga Canyon.
Rest
Love Elif and love Sayaka Murata.
Likewise, Tracy Chapman.
A citizen’s guide to resistance.
Not unrelated, if you’ve wondered how capitalism and our work culture negatively affect you, I discovered this week that the r/antiwork subreddit has an amazing reading list.
What do we lose when we lose our privacy?
Last year I linked Cabel Sasser’s XOXO Festival talk on Wes Cook and his absurd yet beautiful McDonald’s mural. Yesterday I discovered Cabel put up a website of his collection of Cook’s art and sketches of and for Disney properties, Nickelodeon cartoons, and more.
That’s all for this week! I love you for reading, thank you, let’s go—
[F1] The “bare minimum” Artist’s Way amounts to basically how I described doing it myself, which I would argue amounts to not doing it. It would be like saying you did “bare minimum” LIFTOFF if you did one workout with vague intent to do the rest of them, but never got around to it. I harbor no judgment for any of us, but words have to mean things.
[F2] Cameron only addresses the use of Eastern ideology here: “It is one of the pitfalls of Westerners adopting Eastern meditation techniques to bliss out and render ourselves high but dysfunctional.” This is both astute and insufficient, and while we also can’t get further into this here, we note this book originally came out in 1992, and this outdated type of co-option is unfortunately consistent with how people were in the 90s.
Eat
~Liftcord Pick of the Week: ~
Powerlifting made me a better writer.
Why it’s time to move beyond the 1.6-2.2g/kg protein rule. It’s become popular lately to say you don’t need that much protein to build muscle—music to everyone’s ears who has been looking very strongly at $12-per-pound chicken breasts and $11.49-a-dozen eggs in the grocery store—but: “when you dive deep into the protein research, it looks like slightly higher intakes may be necessary to max out your gains.” (I have been saying some version of this. But also, maintaining muscle or being sedentary takes less protein than building muscle on a strength training program.)
It has likewise become popular to say that exercise intensity doesn’t matter, and that all you have to do is achieve a certain amount of fatigue. This, also, is not true, and I have been saying it. Science was hard at work while I was away!
Fat doesn’t deserve its bad rap. A running theme in A Physical Education! Fat serves biological functions, and having a goal of eradicating body fat completely and forever is threatening to our health.
Confessions of a middle-aged gym rat.
From friend of the blog Julia Turshen: It’s okay to want it.
Drink
The New York Times, on it as ever, covered the “natty or not?” discourse. For the uninitiated, “natty or not” may be translated from the Brolic as, “Was your physique obtained naturally, or do you use performance-enhancing drugs?” This has been a recreational topic of discussion in gyms since time immemorial, but has been raised to the power of nine thousand by social media. Every day more and more people post obsessively about how they think this or that person’s physique was obtained, and more and more people google “steroids but legal” and spend $89.99 on a bottle of mysterious pills from StevesPEDbarn.lv.
What I find funny about this is that there are two groups of people who are interested in these discussions. One group, which makes most of the content about this, has a distressingly detailed knowledge of every PED and PED-adjacent substance that exists in every white, black, and gray market the world over. They could eyeball 10 seconds of video of a guy doing a bicep curl and tell you exactly the breakdown of his mostly-illegally-obtained stack. The second, much larger group, which consumes most of the content about this, has barely any idea what’s going on and thinks, like, creatine is steroids (it is not), but gets excited at the idea of undermining any alpha regardless of how or why. Both of these groups are tiny droplets in the vast ocean of most people who do not know or care about any of this.
It’s hard to overstate how overrepresented PED use and discussion thereof is on social media. I wish more mental peace for all of us, so here is how I highly recommend thinking about it. If they are so special-looking that you are asking if they use drugs, and they don’t use drugs, their genetics are probably so unusual/playing such a large role that it doesn’t matter (and even then, “trying to achieve their physique” still also involves several years of dedicated effort). And if they do use drugs: You’d have to use drugs, too. “Guy who uses drugs whose physique you could achieve without them” is not real.
Instagram reels have a weird conservatism. It’s worth putting down one’s phone for a second and reflecting on the fact that you cannot even swear on Instagram or TikTok. What is this, my goldurn mother’s house?
The myth of the “universal patient.”
We are in the age of the “double sell-out,” or “creators who produce market-friendly content to achieve fame — and then use that fame to pursue even more commerce-for-commerce's-sake.”
Rest
How “stoop coffee” transformed one woman’s neighborhood.
RIP Jules Feiffer. The Phantom Tollbooth was one of the books that made me want to be a writer.
To savor your vacation, put down your phone and grab a colored pencil.
Being a good little worker these days relies on “soft skills”. Ironic, when you could sum up job advice between the years 2008-2023 as “learn to code.”
Fake reviews have become the internet’s perfect crime.
From Girls Gone Wild to 'your body, my choice.'
That’s all for this week! I love you for reading, thank you, let’s go—
Casey Johnston
Casey Johnston
Casey Johnston
And now for your dear and beloved paid subscribers, here's the relevant section of The Artist's Way, if you care to read it: