My mind rests in my lap. I have just come from doing an hour of cardio on a tread mill and 45 minutes of weight training legs at the gym. My mind is suspended while I am there. I don’t like exercise, although I do it daily. Why? My body craves it like a dog does a bone or a cat, birds. I say my mind is suspended because I don’t feel my mind is in my body. Movement is like pretending I’m hooked up to a remote control, a helicopter in a young girl’s hands.

I believe working out for me is a form of meditation. It differs not in the sense of empty mind, but in the sense of active body. My body motors around at the gym, sometimes with difficulty if the weight I chose is too heavy.

A friend once said to me, “I like how you move around the gym.” I’m not certain what she meant by this. Maybe she was speaking to the comfortability I feel in the gym; I started weight training at eleven. Maybe she sensed my confidence as I worked my bicep up down, up down. One, two, three and four, five, six, to a total count of twelve.

I am happiest when my mind rests in my lap, suspended once again, but attached to the page, the pen, or the key board. Being in the zone is better than a chocolate cupcake with coconut icing. It is almost as good as the smile the two-year-old gives me when I tell her I like her princess shoes.

I love being suspended. When my mind comes to rest in my brain, it is with a weight like a tug of the string of a flying kite. But it is here, in the brain, that I’m able to work and make out bills; here that I grocery shop for avocados; here that notes when it’s time of go to bed.

It is good to love both, the suspension and the weight. I feel solid. I feel complete. I stand in the grass radiating with the rays of the sun, or on the sidewalk radiating with the glow of the moon. Pretending I’m in the sky is as good as pretending I’m in the gym. Both rock my world.