The Silent Choices

There's an aspect often overlooked in recounting international trips. The stories paint ethereal landscapes and celebrate the embrace of something foreign. Yet, beneath these poetic tales lies a muted counterpoint, a stark, unpoetic reality.

The f’ing logistics.

The logistics never reach the stories we tell. Yet, much like our shadowed battles, these unspoken trials sculpt the contours of our character.

18-hour travel time, a missed connection, delayed bags, numb legs, and the heaviness behind the eyelids. A price not mentioned in the contract.

But in those moments, through the trudge of the travel, there’s a glimmer—the concluding chapter, the return home.

The rushed walk from the car, checked bags and overstuffed backpacks in tow, and the first unreserved breath of the day - signaling your return to solace: the moment the key turns the lock of your front door.

Home.

You quickly unpack, knowing you could use homemade vegetable soup from grandma's recipe book and a shower. A hot one.

The thought of both offer you a mellow homeliness that is only elevated by the imagined soft fabric of your pajamas against your skin and your favorite show running in the background.

But your day dream is interrupted by a cold reminder of what you just endured: how could you ever consider entering your bed without getting the lingering scent of 328 strangers breathing the same air, HEPA-filtered or otherwise, off you.

So haggard and hungry, you enter the bathroom.

After too many hotel nights, the sight of a full-sized shampoo bottle offers a comforting familiar. The idea of a hot shower, a recognizable scent of soap, and a towel that isn't begging to be retired after too many wash cycles fills you with a sense of repose.

This is home, your sanctuary, an opportunity to cleanse the remnants of your 18-hour test of will.

Your feet feel the unusual dryness of the shower floor. Another deep breath hints at a sense of gratitude you didn't know existed. It's almost enough to make you understand, even empathize, with the people who clapped when the plane's wheels hit the runway. Safety.

Your hand reaches for the valve. Your mind is ready for comfort, for warmth, and for release. 18 hours without your personal space would drive anyone to the edge.

Your hands grip the valve. You pause. Something prevents your wrist's instinctive motion toward the gauge's hottest end.

The comforting allure of a warm shower fails to materialize. You find yourself enduring the sharp bite of freezing water.

With every drop on your head, there's a weight, like a child throwing stones at a wall. Painful, but not unbearable. Your shoulders contend with the sensation of dragging nails, and as the water descends, your legs endure the prick of glass.

18 hours of travel - your mind yearned for a hot shower's intimate, encapsulating feeling.

But instead, your body decided to give you a bit more: pain, suffering, and questions as to why you do what you do.

As the cold water strikes and strikes, a familiar internal dialogue returns: “Every choice, a test.”

The cold shock takes a few moments to subside, but then it happens: a warmth rises from your very center. Your physical senses are overwhelmed and overrun but are balanced by a stillness and purpose from within.

In choosing the cold over the warm, the painful over the comfortable, the self-inflicting versus the self-caring, you reaffirmed a foundation of self that doesn’t emerge from chance but from choice.

The water's chilling grip serves as your Excalibur, testing not your endurance but your will. To step willingly into pain is to remind yourself of your mastery of self, to choose your struggle rather than allow yourself to be puppeted by circumstances thrust upon you.

You remembered what you had already accepted: suffering was the way home.

A hot shower offers only momentary solace, neglecting the soul's deeper quests. A hot shower tempts you with fleeting fulfillment, illusions of respite. A hot shower attempts to smooth the scars that testify to a conquered journey.

But a cold shower.

A cold shower gives you the taste of the battles fought in silence. A cold shower doesn't go easy into that good night. A cold shower gives you the chisel from which you carve your character through marble.

But to have such ownership over oneself is not without its costs.

A cold shower is your covenant to discipline: your unyielding commitment against the seductive whispers of complacency, "Just this one time, who would be the wiser?"

But you've danced with discipline long enough to know her: she’s unforgiving.

She demands suffering, and in the process, takes no prisoners. She will rip your throat out and leave you for dead. She will take pliers to your fingernails and still say it wasn't enough.

Discipline is the devil in a new dress. The enemy of the weak. The judge of the dabblers. But the reservoir for those thirsting for profound purpose.

That's the game.

It's not about what you want. It's about what you are willing to demand of yourself.

Behind the tired eyes and the weight of miles traveled, a pivotal moment emerges, crystallized in the turn of a valve. The choice of a cold shower, in the face of sheer exhaustion, becomes a mirror reflecting your innermost values. It's a dance with discomfort, a silent rebellion against the easy path, and a profound recognition that sometimes, your most transformative moments arise from the seemingly smallest of choices.

You don’t want to be remembered for anything less: you rage against that good night.

You choose this life because of who you will become on the other side. It's a path for the few, not the many. It's the walk that never accompanies talk. A road traveled alone. Even if there were a sense of fraternity, it wouldn't last. Discipline demands all of you, heart and soul.

Welcome to the game. Suffering is the price of admission.