Revelations at the gym Part One: Coming Full Circle.

Sometimes it's at the strangest places where your mind starts working overtime and suddenly, like a blinding burst of light, you feel a wee bit wiser.

After work headed down to yck and jumped on my favorite rowboat machine... Thought of doing better than my average (400plus/hour) but I was rather tired. Then thought of maybe using some mind games to push myself, like pretending that the pulley was someone I'd love to hate...and with every pull, I thought vicious thoughts. Idiot. Stupid fool. I don't want to see you ever again. And it did work! Got up to a 500plus average. Emotionally though, I realised I opened up the floodgates of... I don't know what too, something slightly milder than bitterness, something lesser than resentment. Flustered, I walked around the gym, trying to find peace, but it was a hotbed inside. I was fine these weeks but it's all coming back all coming back to me now. In this state of unrest I tried to relax but unconciously my joints, my knees, locked themselves up into a ball of tension. It was as if my body was bracing itself for something it had to struggle through.

Then on the way to the bus, it hit me.

I realised that even while lifting weights, I never did push myself to the maximum. Well, I reasoned, I prefer high intensity speed workouts than over-drawn exhausting ones. And, it was dangerous to overstrain the muscles, right?

I saw a guy, lifting and lifting and adding more and more weights, even though he was perspiring profusely, and his arms had turned red and trembly from the effort. I did glance at him worriedly, but also, I noticed his drive. A part of me respects and admires people for their drive, also it may seem rather perfectionistic to excel, I secretly envy them for their singlemindedness and passion. Like phoebe, who puts her all into a not-so-simple game of cluedo, that while playing with her I almost feel that I'm holmes at the actual murder scene, so doggedly does she do her deductions and comes up with the accusations. People may say, Hey, it's only a game, but I think to these people, it's not the winning or losing that really matters. At the end of the day, it's how much they have improved over their previous form. In fact, after I won the first round, (beginner's 'luck') she wanted to play with me again. Perhaps she found me a worthy opponent. =) But I digress. I never did have to push myself to do anything, to study really hard for anything, never had the drive to succeed because I always chose things that were easy for me, like studying art. Ches brought up an interesting point of view regarding staying in love: How do you know when someone is the right one for you? Like me, he's cynical to the view of falling staying and keep being in love. For me, I disvalue emotions as I see them as only momentary, as per my poem. So, he said, when will you know? When the emotion is a lasting one? And how lasting will it be. Horrors, what if one day you wake up and realise you have abosolutely no feeling for the one lying next to you? Like Ches, I feel too I'm not mature enough for such things, and that the father of my kids is nowhere in sight as yet.

Maybe my character flaw is this, in love, like my gym workout sessions, I flutter to one machine after another, doing really well, but if you ask me to keep it up, I would not be able to. Then again, is that really bad? Why is it so unfair that I have to go through this tumult of emotions and yet he remains blissfully unaware?