Muscles

Did you know a caterpillar has about 4,000 muscles? I mean, that’s insane. I think about that fact every time I struggle to get off the couch. I have, what, 600 muscles? And I can't even convince half of them to cooperate when it's time for gym class. Meanwhile, a caterpillar, which is basically a squishy tube, manages to coordinate thousands of tiny muscle movements just to crawl around and eat leaves. Honestly, if I could borrow even a tenth of that motivation, maybe I wouldn’t dread gymnastics quite as much.

It’s not that I hate moving altogether; I just hate the forced structure of it all. Gymnastics, with its routines and endless practice, feels like trying to force entropy into order. I’m no caterpillar—heck, I’m not even a semi-motivated squirrel. When the coach tells me to do a cartwheel, I feel like I’ve been asked to solve a complex physics equation in front of a crowd. Every muscle in my body protests, and all I can think is, "What’s the point?" Caterpillars never have to do cartwheels. They’re just allowed to crawl along in peace until one day, they get to be a butterfly. Why can't I just skip the awkward gymnastics stage and wake up one day in my butterfly form, effortlessly floating around without having to perform any splits?

I remember my dad trying to pep-talk me before a gymnastics meet once. He’s a physicist, so naturally, he tried to explain it all scientifically. "Zoe," he said, "it's all about momentum, conservation of energy, and using your body's center of mass." He was so enthusiastic, drawing diagrams and waving his arms around. Meanwhile, I was slumped over the kitchen table, thinking about how a caterpillar just does what it does—no physics involved, no practice schedules, no balancing on a narrow beam in front of a room full of people. Just munching leaves and transforming when the time is right.

To be fair, my dad was trying to help, but his physics-based pep talk didn’t exactly make me want to jump into a handstand. If anything, it made me realize how alike we actually are. He might see movement as an elegant dance of forces and principles, but that doesn't mean he likes doing it himself. He hates anything involving a gym just as much as I do. Honestly, if anyone deserves 4,000 muscles, it’s the people who actually enjoy flipping around and twisting themselves into pretzels, not me—or my dad.

And then there are the people who live for the gym. You know the type—the ones who wear gym clothes like it’s a uniform and talk about their deadlift numbers like it’s some profound achievement. I mean, congratulations, Chad, you lifted a heavy thing and put it back down. Truly groundbreaking stuff. Sometimes I wonder if they realize that no matter how many hours they spend perfecting their muscles, they’re still never going to have as many as a caterpillar. All that effort, just to get big and bulky, while a tiny caterpillar is already ahead of the game with 4,000 muscles and zero need to post about it on social media.

So yeah, maybe I’ll never be a gymnast. Maybe I'll always be a bit lazy when it comes to anything that involves coordinated movement. But I like to think that if a caterpillar can manage with all those muscles just to turn into something amazing, then maybe I don’t need to force myself into someone else’s idea of perfect. Maybe I’m just waiting for my own kind of transformation—without all the unnecessary push-ups.