I have always thought of there being three great pleasures in life. But since I started doing triathlons I have added a fourth. In no particular order:
- Food
- Sex
- Music
- Exercise
Of course there are other pleasures in life, which can far exceed any of these -- such as love, parenthood, family, fellowship, problem solving, game playing, creativity, and the pleasure of intellectual discovery and debate. I'm talking here just about the sensory pleasures.
A couple of other points about exercise:
- Exercise is definitely a little more subtle pleasure in some ways, in that it can actually be painful -- at least at first -- but you do find that your body craves it and that you look back on excellent runs and rides and so forth with a strongly pleasurable feeling. As they say, there's a fine line between pleasure and pain -- after all, eating spicy food can be painful too, yet I have found myself addicted to fresh habanero & jalapeno peppers (once you begin eating them you find yourself adding them to nearly everything).
- Anyway, I'm not talking about "runner's high." I often feel totally exuberant
upon finding myself alive, out on a beautiful strip of pavement or a nice
running trail on a beautiful morning, with good company, starting out on a long ride or
run. But that's usually at the start of the run/ride. I don't think I've ever really felt high, in the way some
people describe. It's more of a softer, subtler pleasure, the kind
that you hardly notice at the time, but which suffuses your memory of
the outing and keeps you wanting to go back from more. Right now,
recovering from an injury, I miss my long runs very badly.
- For me the pleasure of exercise is not just the kind of brain-chemical good feeling, either. When you have been injured, or when you think about how many people there are out there with disabilities, there is a joy that comes just in feeling your own movement, your own strength, the elegance of your body's coordination, working like a well-oiled machine (this is on a good day; other times you feel like you're 95 years old). When you think about the number of things that can go wrong in the human body it just feels great to know that, for the moment (until inevitably, one way or another, sooner or later, you fall apart) your body is capable of such motion.
- The sensation applies to swimming and biking, but running brings it out most strongly. I wonder if that has something to do with the theory that humans actually evolved as distance runners.
- It seems as though the pleasures can augment one another. For example, exercise makes you enjoy food more, while music can make you enjoy running more (I'll leave it to you the reader to complete this train of thought).
LOOKING at my list, I realize it covers 4 of the five senses: smell, taste, touch, and hearing. That leaves sight. So, some might argue that I've left out art, visual art. I appreciate a pretty or interesting image. but it just does not seem to rank as highly when it comes to purely sensory, animal, bodily pleasures. Maybe if I were more interested in art or artistically inclined I would disagree; maybe I'm really missing a whole dimension of human experience. But that's how it seems to me. Except insofar as sight is connected to sex, as in appreciation of a beautiful woman, it's just more of a practical sense, for me at least.
I just thought of something -- check out this album cover, it manages to hit 3 of the pleasures in one blow:
IF only she was on a treadmill or something, it would cover all 4. (Or maybe it does -- do you think she's doing squats? Maybe yoga.) I remember looking at this cover when I was a kid (and listening to it; the best track on the album is "Bittersweet Samba" IMHO). Probably had some profound effect on my psycho-sexual development. Or maybe it's just been lying dormant all these years deep in my brain waiting to come out in the form of some crackpot blog entry about food sex and music.
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