Dancing.

Nordstrom had taken to dancing alone.  He considered his sanity unblemished and his nightly dances an alternative to the torpor of calisthenics.  He had chided himself of late for so perfectly living out all of his mediocre assumptions about life.  The dancing was something new and owned an almost metaphysical edginess to it.  At forty-three he was in fine but not spectacular shape, though of late he felt a certain softness, a blurring in the perimeters of his body.  After cleaning up the dishes from a late dinner, he would dim the lights in the den and put an hour’s worth of music on the stereo though recently he often increased it to two hours: the selection was eclectic depending on his mood and might, on any evening, include music as varied as Merle Haggard, Joplin’s “Pearl”, The Beach Boys, Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring, Otis Redding, and the Grateful Dead.  The point was to keep moving, to work up a dense sweat and to feel the reluctant body become fluid and graceful.  The fact of the matter is that Nordstrom wasn’t a very good dancer, but when you’re dancing alone, who cares?

Beginning with his childhood in Michigan he had been an excellent swimmer, a fair flycaster and bird hunter, and a fair basketball player, a fair linebacker, a fair golfer, and a fair tennis player.  Only the swimming haunted his dreams, all other sports had been discarded.  Perhaps swimming was dancing in the water, he thought.  To swim under lily pads seeing their green slender stalks wavering as you passed, to swim under upraised logs, past schools of sunfish and bluegills, to swim through reed beds past wriggling water snakes and miniature turtles, to swim in small lakes, big lakes, Lake Michigan, to swim in small farm ponds, creeks, giant rivers where one was easily swept along easily by the current …

Jim Harrison, from "The Man Who Gave Up His Name"