The Misogi I Didn't Know I Was Doing

I learned about misogi from my personal trainer, a couple of months into a project he and I never named: undoing forty years of a body that got less exercise with every promotion. Wall Street, early on, meant walking — car to train, train to subway, subway to the office, and back again every night, whether I wanted the steps or not. The suburbs took that away; house to car, car to a parking lot, parking lot to a building. Covid finished the job — bedroom to desk, ten feet, zero steps, more hours worked than ever. Retirement didn't fix any of it on its own; if anything it made the neglect harder to ignore, since there was no more commute left to blame. My trainer's the one who used the word, framing it as a way to find out where my actual limits were instead of the ones I'd assumed for myself. He's also the one who put "The Comfort Crisis" in my hands.

The word itself has nothing to do with a gym. Misogi is a Shinto purification ritual — you stand under a waterfall, usually cold, at a shrine that's been doing this for centuries. The water is the point. It's the actual washing, not a metaphor for one. Kegare, the impurity that builds up from ordinary life, from grief, from illness, from just existing in the world long enough to get dusty. You go stand in the water and you come out clean. More or less the whole ritual, minus a thousand years of context I'm not qualified to summarize in a paragraph.

Michael Easter's book takes the word more seriously than most of what's been done with it since. Easter didn't invent the concept, but he's the reason a lot of people my age have heard of it — he traces it back to the Kojiki, the myth of Izanagi washing himself in a river to purify what he'd carried back from the underworld, and then follows the thread forward to Dr. Marcus Elliott, a Harvard-trained sports scientist who runs P3, the performance lab elite athletes use to get faster and stay upright. Elliott's rules are the blunt, secularized version of the ritual: it has to be hard enough that you might not make it, and you're not allowed to die. Easter didn't just report on the idea — he went and did one, spending thirty-three days hunting caribou in the Alaskan Arctic to see if it held up outside a lab. It's a framework, built on an actual myth and tested against actual science, and it earns the comparison in a way a lot of what followed doesn't.

But it didn't stay there. Jesse Itzler — the entrepreneur who ran a rap label and married the Spanx founder — talks about misogi on podcasts as one big annual stunt with a coin-flip chance of failure. By the time it reaches a LinkedIn post, it's shorthand for "sign up for the hard triathlon." No knock on Itzler, or on anyone chasing that version. But the waterfall and the ultramarathon aren't the same thing. One's about purification and humility in front of something larger than you. The other's about proving something to yourself, on a timeline you control.

Here's where I have to implicate myself.

I spent forty years in corporate IT. Weekend releases. War rooms. The kind of career where the biggest annual event was whether the migration finished before the business opened Monday. I was good at it, I mostly liked it, and none of it had anything resembling a fifty percent chance of failure baked in on purpose.

Then I retired and decided to write a novel.

Not "decided" in the tidy sense — I'd wanted to write a novel since grade school, one of those things that sits in the back of your head for decades whether you're doing anything about it or not. The actual draft started as a DayZ role-play journal I wrote for fun back in 2013. Retirement gave me the runway to see if it could stand up on its own. I'm publishing it myself, no agent to blame if it flops. I don't know if it works. I genuinely don't. I've read it more times than any reasonable person should read their own manuscript, and I still can't tell you whether a stranger will feel what I was going for, or set it down at chapter three.

That not-knowing is the closest thing I've got to standing in cold water.

It's not a waterfall. Nobody's life is on the line, nobody's soul needs purifying, and I'd feel ridiculous comparing self-publishing a grimdark horror novel to a thousand-year-old religious rite performed at Mount Ontake. But the shape of the thing — the part where you commit to something with a real chance of not working, publicly, on purpose, because the alternative is never finding out — that shape is familiar. Forty years of my career were built on making sure the outcome was almost guaranteed in advance. And if it did go wrong, we knew exactly how to roll it back. This is the first big thing I've done in a long time where it isn't, and I can’t.

I don't know if the book will sell. That's not the point. The misogi is the act of publishing — putting it where strangers can read it, with no way to take it back. Writing it doesn't count; a manuscript in a drawer is safe. Making money off it doesn't count either; that's luck and timing and a hundred things I don't control. The one moment that counts is hitting publish. Everything after that is just outcome.

Anyway. Book's coming. Water's cold.

— Q.B.