The Feel Good Way

I’m having the best twenty minutes of my day. And it started with getting absolutely wrecked.

Box and Burn, in Lemain Street. If you’ve never done it, let me paint the picture: it’s not a class, it’s a small, sweaty war. Round after round. Punches, squats, burpees, more punches, someone yelling numbers at me when my arms have already filed for early retirement. There’s a moment, usually somewhere halfway the class, where my brain starts negotiating. Can we just… stop? Just for a second? And the answer is always no.

By the end I’m soaked, my legs have turned into two separate, unrelated problems, and my arms feel like I’ve been carrying something enormous for a very long time. In a good way. The kind of tired that means I actually did something.

So obviously, the only sensible next move is a hot bath.

I sink in. And here’s the thing nobody tells you about a proper workout : the burn doesn’t stop when the class ends. It just changes shape. In the hot water, my muscles are doing this incredible thing, a kind of low electric tingle, arms and legs both, like they’re still slightly on fire but in the nicest possible way. Every so often a little pulse of it runs through, a small aftershock of the whole class replaying itself in my nerves. Worked hard, now dissolving. Both at once.

Headphones on. Not my earbuds, nor the speaker across the room, but the real ones, the big over-ear kind, because they’re the only ones that actually let the music breathe. I put on Albinoni’s Adagio in G minor. That slow, aching string swell that starts almost nowhere, just a whisper, and then very, very slowly builds into this enormous wave of sound, a whole orchestra of strings leaning into the same long, sad, beautiful note together.

Albinoni: Adagio in G Minor for Strings 🎵(click to listen)

I close my eyes.

And that’s it. Hot water. Tingling arms. That slow string swell rising and rising through me like it has all the time in the world. Nothing to check, nothing to answer, nowhere else I need to exist. Just this: sound and heat and the pleasant wreckage of my own muscles, all happening at once, all completely devine.

Here’s a strange little thought that comes to me, lying there with my eyes closed. Imagine there’s some being out there -a soul, an energy, something curious and formless- that’s never had a body, never touched water, never felt a wave of strings roll over it, and it’s deciding whether it’s worth the trouble of coming here. Of putting on a body and doing this whole complicated human thing.

I’d tell it about this. Exactly this.

I’d say: come feel a body that worked hard and is now allowed to rest. Come feel hot water on tired legs, that particular ache that means you’re alive and you used yourself well today. Come feel a whole orchestra of strings swell up slowly, right in your own chest, with your eyes closed and nowhere to be. It’s messy and it’s temporary and half the time it hurts in one way or another. But it also does this. It also gives you this.

If that’s not reason enough to come to earth, I don’t know what is.

That, right there, is a delight.