Goines On: Exercise

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Goines reached out to his friend Zen, who had been awfully quiet for days. Was Zen okay? Had Goines offended Zen by telling him, after Zen had professed no interest in a project that meant a lot to Goines, that Zen seemed to be more of a taker than a giver?
    Zen made an effort to put Goines at ease by relenting to write that he had done an hour of spin class that day before playing two hours of competitive tennis, during which his team won one of the two sets, and it had been “good emotionally.” The wording seemed to imply that “it” was the winning – or maybe the socializing – that was the main thing, not the physical exercise, but Goines wasn’t sure. “Spin class” sounded like socializing too. Curious, Goines looked it up. He had been thinking that spinning involved whirling like a dervish to get high, but Wikipedia said it was riding a stationary bicycle. Mrs. Goines “spun” on her stationary Schwinn in the garage, but she had never referred to it as “spinning.”
    Goines was impressed by Zen’s three hours of physical exercise, and he told Zen so. If you spun a wheel with your legs for an hour before two hours of tennis, you DID get some exercise!
    Goines told Zen that his main exercise was his daily half-hour walk, with two sets of 40 or 50 pushups every other day (three times a week), occasional strenuous gardening, putting out sunflower seed hearts for the wild birds every day and cleaning and refilling their bath bowls at least once a week, walking and standing to do household chores and errands, and one or two (or sometimes three) transcendent voidings a week of his vesicular glands.
    Goines hadn’t expected it, but emailing Zen right after breakfast seemed to fuel extra vigor for his walk. He even had to suppress his inclination to “void” before getting off on the walk (but he consoled himself with the thought he could lay hand to that later, maybe after some chocolate following lunch).
    Goines’ vigor today, after sending the email to Zen, manifest immediately he strode onto the street. His step was lively, and he knew when he stopped at his favorite pushup station that he was going to do a set of 60. He even circled around and passed the station twice more, doing another set of 50 each time, for 160 total.
    Goines had to rethink what his main exercise actually was. Maybe it was the mental-emotional-communal exercise of reaching out to a friend...at least once daily?

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