The World May be Ending: Working Out Instead of Wine Club

I knew something had changed when I was helping plan my friend’s birthday a few months ago.  It was one of those big ones with a zero in it.  She quickly dispelled any ideas of the typical birthday extravaganza her husband and I might have been entertaining.  She broke it down to us like this:  “My friends are all in bed by ten, they are all watching what they eat, and they are all trying to stay fit.  I don’t want a sweet sixteen birthday party for grown-ups because no one I know wants to party like that anymore.”   Instead she suggested that we hire a caterer who only cooks organic, locally sourced food and who is also an amazing yoga instructor to prepare a healthy meal for a group of her friends as well as lead a group yoga session. 

So you’re saying no karaoke machine?

The birthday was like the slap to the back of my head I needed to realize that this was no isolated incident.  In fact, the shift from wine—um, I mean—book club to healthy and activity based socializing had been happening for quite some time.  It started out innocently enough with early morning run with girlfriends.  Then I took the leap and ran a few years with an all-women’s running group.  What I had thought of as a safety choice in retrospect was really a form of socializing.  In the last year I stepped it up a notch—unknowingly—and participated in a twelve person 200 mile relay race with a team of twelve women in Las Vegas.  That race was closely followed up by another in Phoenix.  Was it the running?  No.  No it was not.  It was that I had a legitimate reason to go to Vegas with eleven friends and spend a whole 36 hours in a van talking, and talking, and talking.

 In a world of short attention spans and cell phone obsessions I had found a space where I could spend quality time with cool people get to know them, support them in reaching their goals (not collapsing before the end of the race) as they supported me in mine (again not collapsing).   And though I love me my wine, I loved that these connections were made stone cold sober.  The discussions were in depth not because we had a slight buzz but because we were connecting on a real and deep level.

Maybe this is the next stage.  Maybe it was bars in our twenties, book clubs in our thirties, and somewhere in the middle of that decade we start shifting away from the crutch of alcohol to the goal-oriented, ass-kicking phase of socially sweating.  I’m all for it but I can’t quite let go of the karaoke machine.

 

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April 4, 2016 by Nicole Corning | 1 Comment