Tomorrow is Thursday. On a Thursday night every week at 5:30pm for many years I used to teach my favourite all-time-ever aerobics class. BODYATTACK. That class was so much a part of me that it must have, at some point, become cellular. Because even now, more than six months from my last class ever, at 5:30pm every Thursday I feel a nagging discomfort, a sense of foreboding… and I have to think, as you do with this kind of generalised anxiety, “What’s wrong, what have I forgotten?”. Then I remember, I don’t teach aerobics any more. In fact I don’t even live in Christchurch.
I think one of the hazards of living alone is that this kind of reminiscence can take hold and turn to a deeper reverie. I’ve got to say it though. I miss teaching aerobics at Les Mills Christchurch. I doubt there will ever again be anything in my life that will match the utter exhilaration I felt every time I, and about 100 others, let out that primal scream that goes with the peak cardio tracks. I still can’t listen to the “Real Thing”.
As with any extreme experience, you don’t remember the tough stuff.. although most people will have seen me asleep at the wheel of my car in total exhaution outside the gym because there’s only so much work that one little person can take. I would sometimes wake at night in a cold sweat in overwhelming frustration with the powers that added the limiters to the amplifiers’ bass. But even reminding myself of all that. Like a smoker who has given up but can still recall the delicious buzz of their former addiction and wonders if life is not just that little bit less, textured, without it, I miss that thrill of being at the centre of something wonderful.