Sweat: Merits and Drawbacks

Yesterday was one of those classic midwestern summer days, ninety-two degrees, about three hundred percent humidity. It was the kind of day that makes you appreciate what life is like for a steamed dumpling. I don't love that kind of heat, but in the right context I don't hate it either. I think the key to being out in the world-as-oven is simple: you have to keep moving. I've worked more than my share of manual labor jobs, and while I never relished a nine-hour day in ninety-plus degree heat, I have found that the act of doing something - lifting rocks, digging holes, painting - makes the heat a lot more tolerable than, say, just sitting still being miserable. First, it gives you something to think about other than sweating. Second, and more importantly, it gives you something to play against - almost like an added challenge. Lifting forty pound rocks into a wheelbarrow and then hauling them up a thirty-foot scaffold is one level of difficulty. Doing it while your internal organs are cooking adds an edge, in the "oh yeah, is that all you got?" defiant sense of the word. This is a good thing, because it is important to maintain that part of your personality that believes to the last breath that you can't be beaten.

In addition to the defiant part of my person, the one waiting for a coach to tell me to step back up to the line for another round of suicide windsprints, the heat also requires - in a completely paradoxical way - that you give in to your surroundings and live on the world's terms. Yes, you can go inside and get air-conditioned, and even when you go outside that AC will follow you for a few moments, keeping a lovely - though quickly departing - halo of cool around you. But at some point, you have to go outside and be in the world. The heat is out there, and it's not going away. If you work outside all day, it's really not going away, so you have to make peace with it, let it sink into your being and become part of you. There has been more than one sweaty afternoon where, after toiling and dripping and sucking down water for an entire day, I find myself enjoying the heat, reveling in the radiating pulse of oppressive air. This is not to say that I don't keep moving forward in defiance of nature's continuing attempts to kill me, but there is also a level of sweat-soaked enjoyment that comes from accepting the world purely on its own terms.