Living

Tonight my seven year old daughter asked me, "Daddy, what is death?" I said to her, "Mia, it would be like if you went to sleep at night and never woke up."

"Forever?" she asks. "Yes, as far as anyone knows, yes." And I'm kind of unsettled in my response because you want to give your kids really good answers when they ask things and this one is a question I just don't know the answer to. I mean, you wait a good 5 years for them to start talking to you like a person so when the "why this, why that" comes out of their mouths, you want to give good answers. Instead I felt like a 7 year-old.

Thankfully her attention turned elsewhere, but my aging thoughts lingered.

When my daughter talks this way, I get scared. I'm young, but getting older. I want to live a long, healthy life so I can enjoy her for a long, long time. Feeling of vulnerability.

My emotional reaction to this fear day-in and day-out is consistently the same...

I run. I lift. I breathe hard. I sweat. I feel that burning muscular pain. I workout.

For me that workout is a reminder that I am alive and an expression of how I choose to go through life. That workout, in its pure essence, is the second purest expression of living that I know.