Working Out

On Tuesday, around 2:45 p.m., I drove to the gym near my home in Southern Pines, N.C. I hadn’t been there since Saturday. I’ve lately been going three times a week to Gold’s Gym. I seemed to lack time to get there four times a week, as I used to.

I sometimes wear earplugs to help keep out noise of the music Gold’s plays. I think there are a few talk-free stations gym attendants like, and one station plays “heavy metal.” Increasingly, the young lady clerks at the gym front desk seem to tune to that station. That’s why I’ve begun wearing plugs while in the gym.

I found some foam earplugs in my dresser drawer. They were left over from my carpet manufacturing plant days. We were supposed to wear earplugs in noisy areas of the Gulistan Carpet manufacturing plant. Yarn-winding machines generated lots of noise – a steady hum, sort of like thousands of bees working, working, working. The huge yarn-winding room was a place I would not want to spend eight hours a day in. I’d have felt trapped in a prison of white yarn and humming “bees.” I imagine that workers in that area wanted to get to quiet rooms with couches when they got off work. Well, that large room is silent now. No machines sit there. The Gulistan plant lies sprawled like a vacated city – a city long ago evacuated because the people fled from an enemy. Yes, there was an enemy that rose up against Gulistan. That enemy was “debt Gulistan incurred because of the 2008 recession in the U.S.” The company groaned and tried to survive, but the doors (the gates of the city under attack by an economic downturn) closed as company citizens left to find other ways to survive economically. The fellowship of kindred carpet minds was disrupted. The bond that held together about 400 Gulistan associates dissolved as the year 2013 began. People who had workplace bonds said their “so long, it’s been good working with you” kinds of things and drove away from a worn Gulistan parking lot.
 
So, I had some earplugs left over from those carpet-making days, and now I use them at Gold’s Gym to help shield me from heavy-metal music. The earplugs don’t hold out all the sound, but the plugs muffle vibrations enough that I can stand the mind-afflicting “music.”

On Tuesday, I wasn’t in much of a mood to “work out,” nor felt physically attuned to working out, at Gold’s. But I continued plodding from machine to machine and lifting weights and levers and handles on weight machines. My feet hurt badly because of neuropathy. I just had to keep on working out on one machine at a time. After 50 minutes, many of my muscles had stretched and tightened until I felt a sense of accomplishment. I felt good that I had “done” my Gold’s Gym routine.

Day by day our lives are lived, and sometimes we just have to be pleased to daily accomplish some little thing. I often think of this Chinese proverb: “Many things you do are not important, but it’s very important that you do them.”

I thank the Lord for each day’s tasks and the strength to do them.