“If you’re honoring where you are, you are making the perfect-for-you choice, which is what makes it perfect, right?”

Every day these days I seem to need a new set of words to live by, and today they come from Katie, this morning’s stationary cycling instructor on my audio-only fitness app. Imagine them spoken above the opening strains of Toto’s “Africa,” because they were. Of course they were.

I’m a fiction writer who often writes essays about literature. If I’d ever imagined myself living through a global pandemic, the vision would have featured me combing through Grace Paley’s short stories or turning to Tolstoy, looking for guidance and comfort and maybe turning that experience into essays that would bring other people guidance and comfort. Instead, I find myself in the process of retraining myself to read fiction, mainly by turning off my news alerts and hiding my phone and computer and shutting the door on my kids. I am much better at watching TV right now.

I’ve gotten myself on my spin bike two mornings in a row, because I’ve recognized that it’s helpful to everyone who lives in this house if I receive a daily dose of endorphins. Still, there is often a vast sea between knowing what I should do and the act of doing it, so I am pleased I boarded the boat — the imaginary boat that crosses an imaginary sea to the actual bike that goes nowhere.

Fitness instructors on apps or video tend to follow certain norms. Like the reader of a novel, the exerciser suspends disbelief and surrenders to the world of the story. The instructor pretends she can see the lone exerciser. She awards copious high-fives verbally. She believes in “you.” If she acknowledges the artifice, it’s usually in a sidelong way. Just before Katie uttered her words to live by, she said, “That was the perfect first choice. How do I know it was perfect? Because you did it for you.” How convenient that, in English, the singular “you” can be indistinguishable from the plural “you.”

Katie is a real person, but these are recordings, and so she is frozen in time. I don’t know when they were made, but most of the workouts I’m doing were probably recorded before pandemic times, an idea that inspires competing emotions. Canned Katie has no idea, the poor sweet ignorant girl. Or canned Katie must be some kind of diviner, to know so exactly what I (yes, I!) would need.

For twenty to thirty minutes a day, Katie tells me what to do, and I make choices within narrow parameters. Do I want to increase resistance a quarter turn or a half turn? Do I want to stay in the saddle or stand up for this last set? I show up for her instructions and I stay for her encouragements, which are nuggets like, “I’m so proud of you.” And “Thank you so much for taking this time and giving it to yourself.”

The same words would have played if I hadn’t tried my best. But it does me more good here to suspend disbelief than to cling to it. Without Katie’s words to prompt me, I wouldn’t have taken a moment to feel proud that I’d managed to do this one thing. I would have moved on to the next part of my day without accepting her framing of time as something I should be thanked for giving to myself — not as something I’d sneaked or taken from my family.

Even for a fitness instructor, Katie is notably peppy and positive. I voluntarily spend a lot of my time wrestling with the written expression of complex and often dark emotions, so it is tempting for me to dismiss Katie’s brand of positivity as shallow and unhelpful. But it helps me.

It helps me partly because it’s easy to joke about. When my friend texted me that her order of 50 pounds of flour and 24 pounds of yeast had just arrived and wondered if she’d lost her mind, I texted her back, “You made the right choice for where you are right now.” She knew it was a safe place because I’d just received my delivery of 50 pounds of flour a couple of days earlier. I told her I was going to follow the guidance of the spin instructor on my app all day long.

I told her, “Katie says, ‘If you’re honoring where you are, you are making the perfect-for-you choice.’”

I said, “She is talking about how much the unseen exerciser turned up the knob in the previous set, but I’m sure nothing could go wrong if we applied it to everything today.”

She agreed that Katie is a genius. We both know that if we applied Katie’s axiom to everything, plenty could go wrong. It could be used to justify any number of self-destructive or deeply selfish acts. Maybe our bulk food buying is a selfish act. But it’s also probably not great that I had to go to three stores the last time I went out shopping in order to find one bag of flour. I will give any neighbor a cup of flour right now (from a safe distance), and within hours of its arrival, my friend had given away more than half of her yeast on a Facebook group, delighting local bakers and probably causing several failed sourdough starters to be pitched in the garbage at last.

Katie’s axiom is flawless when applied to the question of whether to turn up the knob on the bike, but it’s also useful for people who notice what they aren’t doing well more easily than they notice what they are doing well. There are a lot of us, especially right now.

My husband and I are tired and often anxious, but we do sometimes find ways to tell each other we’re doing a good job. We might say, “You were patient with the kids,” or “This bread is so good!” (That flour has to go somewhere.) When we have the energy to receive an honest answer, and sometimes when we don’t, we ask questions like, “Are you okay?” and “How are you doing?” In response, we say things like, “This is really hard, but I think we’re going to be okay, basically, at some point. Right?”

We don’t say things like, “You can do it!”, or “I’m so proud of you for showing up!” We spend a lot of time and energy encouraging our kids in these discouraging times, and those expressions are a little off-brand for both of us. Even (especially) our nine-year-old would roll his eyes. But Katie’s encouragement is recorded. She only had to say it once. It’s real because she genuinely means it and it’s fake because she’s pretending it’s personal, but I agreed to dream that dream when I downloaded the app, way back when.

There is a special drama in the final “hill” of a cycling workout. It’s the stationary cyclist’s last chance to turn up the dial, to Go. For. It. Today (my today — not Katie’s), before the final set, Katie asked, “Are you at your edge? Are you at the top of hard?”

It’s a strain to see around the metaphor to the literal. I’m at my edge, but I’m pretty sure I’m not at the top of hard. I think we’re all just starting to realize the top of hard might not even be in view yet. I honored where I was. I disobeyed Katie’s order to empty the tank.

“Give yourself a hand,” she said. “That was awesome.”