Perfect

Locker rooms can be interesting. Men’s away. I have no idea what happens across the hall in the Ladies equivalent, but in our space, things can get, sometimes, odd. The chief factor of course being nakedness, but after that there exists another several layers of weird. The tennis players have their own rituals as do the lifters, the rowers, the pilates core and of course, perhaps the weirdest of all, the  cyclists. As a group the yoga folks are generally calm and quiet perhaps still in a lingering shavasna glow. There are other classifications but those represent our club’s main groupings where the young mix with the old, the strong with the meek and the big with the bigger. 

Some of the guys wear shower shoes and some don’t. Some take forever to change, some set PBs with every workout. Some shave, some floss, some brush every hair and most of their teeth. The last few days our smallish lockers have barely been of sufficient cubic footage to hold the many layers of clothing worn to combat the cold rain and snow. 

I try personally to engage with whomever is closest, the most similarly aligned or one of our cycling mates. Being a club employee, an instructor, I see it as my responsibility, at the very least, to make everybody feel at home and part of our club. Normally I am in a state of post-session endorphin flow so being animatedly extroverted is picking low hanging fruit. Bottom line, amid all this social chaos and mixture of personality types, I just try to be normal. 

Whatever that is.

Today, after a particularly grueling set of progressive hill climbs each ending with a sprint, I was feeling like a vegge burger left too long on the grill. Over-cooked and done-for. Perhaps this was a result of the set or, as I mentioned in class, due somewhat to the interruption of our cherished consistency ideal by the freak weather the week delivered to our door. Or it could be that I was again struggling with AFib. Or, most likely, some combination of all of the above. 

After the set I am out of the shower, and extra log and super hot one, toweling off when one of the tennis guys, a superb player and a rock music fan, opens his locker a few feet from mine. I casually ask how he is doing and he says without hesitation ‘perfect’. He then has the social skill to ask the same question of me. I let loose a long, deep and sincere belly laugh and tell him that, while OK, I am a long way from perfect. 

From rows away I can hear laughter, some snickers subdued and some vociferous guffaws. The subdued, in my instant analysis, from the guys who consider me a cocky, arrogant, SOB drill sergeant, and the vociferous from the other half that sense a Zen moment of honest introspection. 

He is no where near perfect!!! HA, can’t believe I just heard that. HA!

And I stumble into the story about that very topic being the theme of our workout today. That no one is perfect. That our entire focus should be on a dedicated search for continual improvement and not something as nebulous as the abstract idea of perfection. 

In my awkward attempt at catharsis through completion, I am silently reminded of a saying that suggests that although I am not as good as I would like to be, as fast as I want to be, or as strong as I can be, I am happy that I am better today than I was yesterday. 

I can’t quite put a condensed version into the proper words, so I smile and appreciate the moment, thinking to myself that the circumstance, amid this chaos, the special serendipity, is…

Perfect.