I have feared eternity for as long as I can remember. My life has felt less like a spiritual journey than a protracted campaign in a war for my own soul. Much of that campaign has been chronicled in my collection of essays, The Theology of Biceps, where barbells, vanity, faith, mortality, and salvation wrestle each other beneath fluorescent gym lights. Lately the battle has intensified. I am approaching sixty-five, that age when abstractions begin presenting themselves as appointments rather than ideas, and I have reread, for the fifth time, Emmanuel Carrère’s The Kingdom, his brilliant, maddening meditation on Christianity. Between Carrère’s relentless fascination with the Apostle Paul and my own inability to leave theological questions alone, I have spent months drowning in what I call Theological Vertigo: that state in which every answer generates three new questions until the mind becomes exhausted by its own seriousness.
Our family vacation to Carlsbad interrupted the cycle. I read less. I wrote less. For the first time in months, my mind had room to breathe.
One morning we ate breakfast at the French Corner. I ordered a savory crepe and drank coffee softened with milk, cinnamon, and honey. It was, without exaggeration, one of the most satisfying meals of my life. I left the table neither hungry nor bloated but suspended in that miraculous middle ground where appetite and satisfaction shake hands. For several fleeting minutes I experienced something approaching perfection. The meal did not merely fill my stomach; it seemed to quiet some hidden chamber of the soul that usually refuses to stop talking.
Then we wandered into downtown Carlsbad. My family disappeared into a used record store while I remained outside. I have never liked the smell of old books or aging paper. To many people it evokes nostalgia. To me it smells like mildew wearing a tweed jacket.
As I waited, I found myself contemplating the familiar inventory of deficiencies: the thirty extra pounds I continue to carry, my inconsistent discipline, and my growing realization that I need more daily companionship than I once admitted.
Then I noticed two men walking toward me.
They appeared to be in their early seventies. Both wore safari hats, T-shirts, shorts, and tennis shoes. Their phones rested casually in their back pockets rather than monopolizing their attention. Their conversation flowed with the easy rhythm of men who had probably taken the same walk together hundreds of times. They laughed. They listened. Neither seemed in a hurry to dominate the conversation or perform for an invisible audience. Their calves were sculpted from years of walking rather than months of gym heroics. They looked younger than many men twenty years their junior because their bodies had quietly become advertisements for moderation.
I envied them immediately.
Not simply because they were lean, although I certainly noticed that. I envied the life their bodies implied. These were men who had discovered that exercise and friendship need not compete for time. They had fused physical fitness with social fitness into a single daily ritual.
I doubted they spent evenings rereading Emmanuel Carrère or wondering whether Paul was history’s greatest religious genius or its most successful narcissist. I doubted they classified themselves as “religious,” “spiritual,” “agnostic,” or “secular.” They probably possessed something rarer than an ideology.
They possessed common sense.
You take care of your body.
You walk every day.
You eat reasonably.
You cultivate friendships.
You show up.
You repeat the process tomorrow.
None of these habits requires a bestselling self-help book or a sophisticated theology. They emerge from the accumulated evidence of ordinary life. They are conclusions reached not by speculation but by observation.
Standing outside that record store, I began to wonder whether I had spent years practicing Existential Overfishing—casting my line ever deeper into the waters of ultimate meaning until I had forgotten the fish swimming near the surface. Had I mistaken depth for wisdom? Had I become so absorbed in metaphysical puzzles that I had overlooked the plain truths available to anyone willing to pay attention?
Questions flooded in.
Is common sense enough?
Is common sense superior to profound religious contemplation?
Have I submerged myself beneath a sea of fascinating but largely irrelevant abstractions?
Have I mistaken intellectual complexity for spiritual maturity?
Have I, after all these years, simply lost the plot?
Perhaps the life of the Common Sensalist is the wiser path.
A Common Sensalist believes that flourishing depends less upon elaborate theological systems or fashionable self-improvement programs than upon the quiet authority of ordinary experience: daily exercise, enduring friendships, moderation, meaningful work, simple pleasures, and habits repeated until they become character. Such a philosophy does not reject transcendence. It merely insists that the road toward it may begin with putting on walking shoes instead of opening another theological treatise.
As I stood there waiting for my family to emerge from the record store, I felt strangely melancholy. I had spent decades wrestling angels while two elderly men had apparently settled for walking with friends.
I still wasn’t sure who had chosen the better path.
But I knew exactly where I wanted to eat breakfast the next morning.
Cinemorphosis 