And Then There's This...The Emily Dickinson Workout

Whenever some guy boasts that he's “gone outside” his “comfort zone” to deliberately risk life and limb, my instinctive response is “Better you than me.” I did not spend years constructing MY comfort zone (which boasts climate control, cushioned furniture and a well-stocked bar) to depart from it on an ego-propelled whim.

Even as a lad I was drawn toward a lush indoors existence. When my well-muscled, hardworking father asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up, I said, “Relaxed.” The extra wrinkle I added to his already furrowed brow was a small price, I felt, for keeping his ambitions for me in check.

The brain — which is the gateway to all excitement — need not be activated by a violent stimulation of the senses if one's imagination is intact. Besides, the imagination is safer, cheaper and leaves no carbon footprint. Emily Dickinson, whose only form of physical exercise was fleeing to a backroom when visitors knocked at her front door, had it right when she wrote:

There is no Frigate like a Book

To take us Lands away

Nor any Coursers like a Page

Of prancing Poetry –

This Traverse may the poorest take

Without oppress of Toll –

How frugal is the Chariot

That bears the Human Soul –

So persuasive was her point of view that among the things I've never done and never plan to do are fly in an airplane, helicopter or balloon; bungee jump; swim; ice skate, roller skate, skateboard; ride a motorcycle; ski; tap dance, square dance, line dance or slow dance; run marathons; shoot rapids; or go down an up escalator. I confess, though, that in 1959 a lady whose affections I was trifling with convinced me to ride the roller coaster with her at Camden Park in Huntington, West Virginia. The experience so terrified and enraged me — not to mention whiplashing my hair into dreadlocks — that I could barely stand being married to her for the next 65 years.

The noxious notion that the unrisked life is no life at all found its most popular expression in Tim McGraw's 2004 Grammy-winning record “Live Like You Were Dying.” In it, a man facing a terminal illness decides that instead of sinking into despair he'll go full Rambo: “I went skydiving/I went Rocky Mountain climbing/I went two point seven seconds on a bull named Fu Manchu.”

Upon hearing this, I went into the kitchen, took two Tylenols and wrote this poem:

I sing of the life vicarious

in which adrenaline junkies don't harry us

to scale rocky walls

and kayak down falls

when watching a movie would carry us

I celebrate things sedentary--

like snails, the great sloth, my Aunt Mary.

I will not abet

any dictate to sweat

for the smell of a gym makes me wary.

I sing of experience muted

by caution survivally rooted.

No walks on the brink

just an instinct to shrink

and sleep through the horns when they're tooted.

(Please send your comments or questions to stormcoast@mindspring.com with “And Then There's This” in the subject line. And thanks for reading.)