The war at home

I’m sitting in the sushi bar after closing, fishing my chopsticks around in my lunch, made specially by the chef for us employees, and I’m thinking about human endurance.

I’ve been reading about David Blaine, the street magician turned endurance artist who emerged today from an acrylic aquarium where he had been living underwater for a week, suffering from liver damage, acute muscle pain and all sorts of other aliments. The man has balanced on a 22-inch platform atop a 100-foot pole for 35 hours, been buried alive in a see-through coffin for a week, survived inside a gigantic block of ice for 61 hours and fasted for 44 days inside of an acrylic box suspended over the Thames River.
Plenty of news articles list the facts of his feats, but none give me answers to the questions I have –

What does it feel like to live in a body that’s been pushed to the edge of experience?

Where does the mind drift when there is nothing to concentrate on but hanging in there for just another second . . .and another and another? Does it drift at all?

How do you stay motivated to pursue an insane, outlandish dream?

Who has done anything like this before?

Now David Blaine surely has done well for himself with this brand of professional insanity – each stunt gets him a television special, media coverage, thousands of new fans and surely more money than he needs – but I can’t help wonder if he isn’t doing it not because of those things but in spite of all that. You see, the most of us can only guess what it’s like to be the point on the parabola that brushes the x-axis, and though the entire world may watch him, but only Blaine understands how it feels.

Those who test the limits, do they experience more life, more risk, more humanity than the rest of us? Do they give more love? Do they gain more understanding? I’d like to know. I’d like to push myself as far and as hard as I can. I’d like to arc through the sky, burning like a comet, to touch snow covered peaks and heal broken souls. I want to grasp at infinity and come back a little wiser. I want to bend mightily but never, ever break. And if I do break, I want it to be with style, agonizing and transcendent, inspiring.

But right now, at this inescapable moment, it seems enough of a feat to choke down my lunch of squid and mushrooms mixed with rice.
I eat about half, and brush the rest into the trash.