Alone

What I find interesting is that once I get close to people or spend more time away from my home, the more I need to get time to myself and make time to think and just be alone.  It thus follows that I wind up working out more when I'm in relationships or getting very close to friends, or generally finding myself in more social situations throughout my life.

It's not a matter of disliking people or not wanting to be around them, but rather a need to have time to myself.  In a way, writing has the same effect, but I'm often talking or working at the same time as I'm writing, and thus the effect is lost.  When I'm working out on the other hand, I am completely alone, lost in a world of really loud music and the sort of really good pain that makes one particularly aware of their own body.

And that's precisely the way I like it.  When I work out, I don't keep track of time, I don't care who or what wants my attention at a given moment, and it really doesn't matter what's going on in the world around me.  At all.  It's nice.  It's time to myself, it's a way to listen to music, to get away from the flood of people passing through my life on a regular basis, and it allows me to really feel myself.

I like the isolation that working out gives me because it gives me a more acute sense of myself.  I mean that in a way that transcends the physical and enters also into the emotional.  Over time, I've gotten better at understanding my body, its limits, and its abilities.  Working out allows me to experience and assess all of that at once, to feel it and come to better understand myself as a result. 

When I work out, I don't have to pretend or care...I can't pretend or care about pretenses or appearances because it's not about that in the least.  It's about me.  Me, myself, and I.  Nothing less, nothing more.  And that's exactly the way I like it sometimes.