PERFECT FITNESS

"On Track, Holland", oil, by Rene Pleinair

“Knowing the perfect fitness and equanimity of things...”

     -- Walt Whitman, “Song of Myself”

     There’s much talk these days about physical fitness, but I’m also interested in the kind of fitness I often find in my life, at those charming times when everything seems to fit as perfectly as pieces in a puzzle. In this seemingly disordered world, it seems like this type of fitness, this cohesion and togetherness, is usually only a distant hope. There seems to be far more chaos than accord, far more pandemonium than peacefulness. However, what I’m slowly discovering is that this view of life as being totally topsy-turvy is as untrue as the belief that the sun circles the earth. There is, I think, an order and aptness – a gentleness, you might say – at the center of things, if only I could see through the disorder to recognize and appreciate it. All things, I think, are always where they must and should be, and all events unfold in a secretly cohesive and well-ordered pattern. What we see as bedlam and wickedness is the world’s way of saying the earth is the center of the universe, or train tracks meet at the horizon. I know those are illusions, and I know the belief that life is a loose cannon ready to create chaos is just as illusory. Somewhere at the center of all mayhem and mischief beats the heart of wholeness and harmony, and it is my stirring task to discover it, day after day, moment by moment.