If ever I have been a fool, it has been in the belief that the body and the mind are two separate things.
I don’t remember when I made that decision; made that fatal choice, like Sophie, and picked one over the other. As a small child, nobody could stop me dancing in the rain without any clothes on (mum tried to get me to wear at least a coat but I promptly took it off and threw it on the doorstep), or racing down a hill on a toboggan, or climbing a tree. True, I was never very good at it - often fell over or got stuck or fell out of my wellies into a puddle - but I did it with exactly the same eagerness I had when I picked up a book and tucked myself into a corner; felt it as much a part of me as the characters I loved that weren’t real. Fiction and reality played with each other happily, and my body and my mind were two parts of the same thing - to be loved and enjoyed equally - and I was made up of both of them.
At some stage, this changed. I don’t know what it was that did it; perhaps the ridicule of always being the last picked in PE, perhaps reading too much Austen - the most stationary of all novelists - perhaps sheer laziness, but at some point I decided (without ever realising I had decided) that my mind was important to me, and my body was not. That what my mind could do meant infinitely more than the unattractive vehicle I carried it around in, and I was no longer interested in humiliating one with the failure of the other.
Further, somewhere in that strange process - the process of choosing one side of me over the other - I convinced myself that people who cared about their bodies were somehow… lacking. In soul, in spirit, in thought. That - in a world of many important things to see, and think about, and feel - they had chosen to focus on what they looked like; the ultimate sign of spiritual emptiness. And, in choosing an identity - as we all do, at some early, early stage - I probably asked myself: did Sylvia Plath go to Fitness First? Could I imagine Oscar Wilde or Shakespeare sweating like pigs on the cross trainer? Did Dickens do yoga? And - since the answer, as far as I knew - was not in any of the pictures I’ve seen, I decided not to either. The world was clearly split into fit people, and clever people, and I wanted to be the latter.
I have not exercised since. For six weeks three years ago I went through a momentary gym phase - prompted by dating a boy who was particularly good looking and quite liked toned arms on girls - but gave that up when it ended, and since then I have simply sat, and thought, and sat, and then thought a little more, and gone a little bit bonkers at some intervals and very bonkers at others.
This evening, I joined the local gym: further, I went. I did the cross-trainer and sweated and grunted and swore, and then I went on the treadmill which - being Japanese - I couldn’t understand a word of and nearly fell off and broke my head, and then cycled on the cycling machine until I couldn’t see anything and my face was beating and the only thing my brain could think was why can I feel my legs?
And then, wobbling and dripping and red, I wandered back to my bike with my t-shirt stuck to me in places I didn’t think t-shirts stuck and sat on it, utterly still, huffing and puffing and thinking absolutely nothing apart from: Jesus Christ, my body is just as weak as my brain is.
When I eventually got the strength up to cycle home again, I didn’t get very far: in fact, I only got to the river before I stopped.
I had never seen the mountains before. They had been there, obviously - mountains don't move that frequently - but I had never seen them. Never noticed the dip in the middle of them, or the different shades of blue and green and grey. Never seen the river like that; never seen the clouds turning as pink as they were turning. And, putting my bike down on the edge, I sat on a bench (smoking a cigarette but let’s pretend I wasn’t) and watched the sky turn bright red behind blue mountains in the most beautiful sunset I have ever seen; watched eagles - kestrels, hawks, whatever they are (big things with hooked beaks) - gliding over the trees, and white Japanese cranes skimming the water; felt wind in my face and mosquitos biting my legs (nothing is ever perfect).
And, although my legs were aching and my t-shirt was still wet and my cheeks were still purple, I was calmer than I could remember being for a long, long time. Calmer, possibly, because my legs were aching and my t-shirt was wet. And I knew, suddenly, that it was my favourite moment of being in Japan. In an entire year of waiting to find out why I am here.
As I sat and watched the sky get darker and redder and then blacker and the stars pop out, I wondered just how many sunsets I have missed in the last year. How many eagles I haven’t seen, how many winds I have not felt, how many mosquitos have not bitten me, because I’ve been too wrapped up in my own head to see or feel them. How many important things I had not seen, or heard, or felt, because I was too busy trying to see and hear and feel them with just my mind instead of all of me.
Body and mind are not separate at all; they are part of the same thing - intwined in each other - and when I chose one over the other I ruined both of them. Sylvia Plath and Oscar Wilde? One killed themselves, and the other died, alone and ostricised, in a French prison. Half an hour on a running machine might have done both of them the world of good.
As the sun set over the mountains next to my house, I realised two things. That it was my body, as well as my mind, and looking after one was the only way to look after the other; that I had to make them both strong at the same time. That I would be smarter for it, and happier for it, and not less.
And I realised - with a burst of relief - that it was my sunset, and they were my mountains, and now that I had them nobody could take them away again.
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