I have committed myself to a journey that may take more than nine years.

I’m watching One Piece during my workouts. That is three episodes a week. Nothing heroic. Nothing optimized. Just three small openings in the week through which I will sail into an enormous imaginary world.

There is something wonderful about beginning a story without knowing what it will eventually become. I don’t even know what I am looking for. I only know that thousands of episodes away there is some emotional country I have never visited, and that people who love this series seem to have found something there.

So I am setting out without expecting an answer about what it means.

That feels important.

The workouts provide the physical rhythm. Meanwhile another voyage advances invisibly beside them. Week by week my body moves through ordinary time while Luffy and his world accumulate somewhere inside memory.

Years from now I may look back at these first episodes and scarcely recognize the person who began watching them.

That is what I want.

I have spent so much time trying to recover lost pieces of the past that there is something delicious about deliberately creating a future memory instead.

Tonight I have finished episode 4, and there is only the horizon ahead.

Three episodes a week.

A ship moving toward something.

And me, cheerfully ignorant of what waits beyond the next island. 🚀🌊