The Reality Bath

All I really know about this title is that Mark Twight used it in his book "Kiss or Kill" and that it's the name of, if I recall correctly, a frozen waterfall.

That's beautiful.

I think waterfalls are awesome places of power, fury and constancy. I loved visiting Niagra with Peter and some Buffalo people a few years ago. I wish they didn't have those ridiculous lights turning the waterfall, pink, green, blue, purple, chartreuse. Instead, I would've loved to be on a very small boat or skiff at the basin, full moon turning those million gallons of rushing water into beautiful mirrors. I wish I could be in my small sliver of wood or tin, deafened by Niagra's fury. I am on a quest to forge my body into its most perfect form, lean, powerful, strong, enduring. But no matter what heights I achieve, I will never compare to these cataracts. Awesome. AWESOME! I want to float tremulously in that small boat, shouting and laughing. What amazing power!

Now imagine it frozen. Stark, perfect beauty. I picture it in my mind's eye. The lines, the movement, the suggestion of speed, the suggestion of power, the form of fury and expressed in the cold, statuesque elegance of ice.

Beautiful.

I remember in Twight's essay, how as he climbed that waterfall alone, he thought how suited this name was for the waterfall. Reality Bath. If you had any delusions about your beauty, they were stripped away when you climbed this high-grade mountain of slick, ice. Winds whipping around you, flaying you alive as they find their way through every crevice of clothing, hands numb from gripping onto nothing but ice and steel. As you look down, I suppose, you can only imagine what it must be like to fall hundreds of feet onto the hard, unforgiving ice. I wonder if anyone will have the courage to imagine their skull being sundered in an explosion of blood. The reality bath.

The reality bath.

I imagine the reality bath is going to be the very opposite of a bubble bath. Not warm. But freezing. Not comforting. But agonizing. I imagine it to be like a full body immersion in freezing acid. First the nerves and system are shocked. Then everything dissolves, layer by layer. The deceptions that we wrap ourselves in, the comfortable things we say to ourselves to repair and shield our egos from the terrible TRUTH, these things are dissolved. And each shell of lies comes off painfully until even the very structure of our lives, the bones, are nothing more than dust and scum on the surface.

The reality bath.

The truth is rarely going to be pleasant, particularly when it is about who we are. But like Twight and Bruce Lee, men who I admire in many respects, it is about progress and it is about becoming who we are and finding who we were that we take these reality baths. It is about the reality of our very existence.

Don't be afraid of pain.