Heaven from Hell
blue skies from pain
Can you tell a green field
from a cold steel rail?
Been stuck in my head a bit.
As part of my yoga course, I have to also do a number of extra classes in studios of my choice. It's a way of getting us acquainted with as many instructing techniques as possible, I suppose, while also ensuring we maintain a constant practice. So for the sake of convenience, I joined a nearby gym. Woeful, since I've never liked these kinds of places one bit, but it's right down the street, and money-wise, it just made sense.
And I was quite struck by my first visit. The gym is located on the ground floor of a new luxurious apartment complex, of the sort that have been popping up all over town (and going at exorbitant rates). You can easily pay 50k Euros more to live in a 2-bedroom in one of these than in one of the older Communist apartment blocks, which is quite a bit of money for Romania.
Now, the claim is they're made from better materials and supposedly sturdier in the face of cataclysm. My parents' generation still remembering the terror and destruction of the 1977 earthquake (which brought down a host of buildings and killed many, many people), it's a big selling-point in our country. And while it's an understandable fear, especially if you spend time in any of the older buildings downtown, I remain dubious. As far as I see,
a. you have no way of actually knowing the quality of materials used in these constructions and it seems each day, more information is coming out about shoddy construction deals in these kinds of enterprises; and
b. until there is an earthquake comparable to the 1977 one (God forbid), we have no way of actually knowing.
And good luck picking yourself out from underneath the rubble to go argue with the developers over false promises of safety, eh.
Nevertheless, it's supposed to be "safer" and at the end of the day, it just looks a whole lot fancier than our typically depressing Communist buildings. Since it's right down the street, I walk by there fairly often, and even I see that the crisp, white buildings look all clean and stylish, especially by comparison.
So what if they're literally sardined together and you can see inside your neighbor "from across the street"'s balcony? So what of privacy? So what if the walls are cardboard-thin and you can hear everything? So what if you'll be in debt for the next 30 years?
You get to live inside a luxurious new place that sets you quite clearly apart from peers and your parents' generation, as someone who has made it. It doesn't seem like these are worthwhile trades to me, but maybe I just don't know what's good.
The far more worrying thing, I think, is the specter of 15-minute-cities I see in these complexes. Obviously, these buildings are aimed at corporate, business types who spend most day in the office, anyway, and don't have the time to get out to other areas of the city.
Fine by us, we'll give you everything you may possibly require. There's 2 or 3 grocery stores literally inside the ground floor of those buildings. There's a school, there's a vet, a pharmacy, obviously a gym, and several restaurants and cafes. It seems every day I go by there, I discover another neon sign I didn't know was nestled so close by. I expect there's some sort of a doctor service as well. There's a little spa across the street, though that doesn't belong to them per se.
You have literally no need to ever leave the building, and with such demanding jobs, who has the time? Oh yes, there's of course offices here also, though I don't know if they're the same people living inside the apartments.
It just seems incredibly depressing to me that for the sake of apparent "convenience", we'd exchange a walk, life, nature reemerging, the potential of running into someone new for the first time, trying different things, or just, you know, living.
I disliked the gym immensely. It was all industrial gray and soulless. Inside the studio where they do yoga, there's these gnarly gray-silver pipes across the ceiling and the walls are black and urging you on to move and look hot for Instagram or whatever. It's quite horrible.
It didn't help that my first experience of the place was of the pool, as I'm someone who adores swimming.
Doesn't it look unbearably sad to you? All that black and gray, like you're inside a factory. How can that ever compare to swimming freely in the sea? Is that even swimming at all? My main concern with gyms is that they have a habit of deepening the separation between mind and body, instead of bridging it as they should. Yoga, dancing, swimming, these are all physical activities that bring my soul, mind and body into closer, deeper connection. And I'm sure that's true of other activities I might not engage in. Yet I look at the people "working out" around me, and see them glued to screens, watching a montage of a valley in Italy or a Friends rerun, or working even, just anything to put themselves as far away as possible while their body does this intense, necessary work. They treat movement like taking out the trash, somehow, and that's sad and frightening to me.
I'm only a month-long visitor here. Thank God. Though I do wonder and worry for the people who waste away precious years never moving outside their concrete perimeters. Imagine slaving away your whole life to have enough money for that luxury.
