The disciplines:

take cold showers

avoid soda and alcohol.

exercise. daily. NO ONE PUSH UP DOES NOT COUNT.

engage in prayer.

do not eat snacks. do not graze. do not eat five meals a day. do not pass GO. do not collect $200.

shun television, the internet. Do not look outside if you suspect the sun's light awaits.

you must get at least seven hours of sleep each night.

I'm fairly certain that's the gist of it.





You grapple with this hell-simulator in tandem with other madmen, and 'men' really means men this time. For men have become estranged from one another, and must grope about in the blinding dark after one another if they would be reunited.





I admit that I am painting a fairly snarky and unflattering picture of what Exodus 90 is about. That's because it is day 39, and we are, chronologically, in the basement of a subterranean freezer designed to purge the weak. So I am cold, and I cannot take a therapeutic hot shower to warm either my body or my heart. But somewhere deep in that same heart is a frozen, quivering icicle of joy.





As the exercise's name implies, Exodus 90 is meant to be a sojourn from slavery into freedom. And I'm writing today to explain to you--perhaps prematurely, hubristically, may the gods not strike me down--that, against all odds, it works.





My fellowship has not been perfect. We have each been gored by the disciplines, sometimes relentlessly, repeatedly. Because we hate ourselves, one addendum from our group was that a day was to be added for each failure. We are fast approaching the terminus of an extra month.





Sweets have taken us. Internet surfing has done us in. Some cannot help staying up late. Others cannot persevere beyond one push up. It has been rough as well as humiliating.





But a few things have made it worth it. One of them being the accolades and acclaims we have received just for doing it at all, however poorly. Our own priest called us an "inspiration," which I'm sure was not meant to provoke the shame-induced vomit which it did as we listened and simultaneously and vividly played before our eyes all our failures.





The other reason it has been worth is because, by golly, I'm actually beginning to feel free.





Let me explain.





In the past thirty-nine days I have noticed the slow but steady reduction of a low-level buzzing at the back of my mind. That buzzing is the byproduct of non-stop, drop-dead stimulation. I am a phone-addict. I wander the vast fields of reddit long after all the other souls of the damned have been extinguished by the blinding desert's heat. I am a youtube wraith: I haunt the shrines and temples of various content creators, and I watch them, and I groan when I see, parched from thirst, no other new videos to watch. I am a video game junkie--a destitute one at that. My (hand-me-down) laptop is five years old. If I sit it on my lap for too long, a new star will be born from the intense pressure and heat.





My popular reputation is that of being a Luddite, but this is only half true. I may not be engaged with many of the major platforms my peers use, but the ones that I am on I wring every last drop from.





It has been the major disappointment and struggle of my recent life.





This is the reason I wanted to do Exodus 90. I knew I needed an escape from the prison I had gleefully locked myself in. Even though I hated it when my friend asked me. Even though I hated the idea of not having cold showers.





The weakest part of me accepted out of shame. Shame at not being tough enough to handle it. Shame at being left behind.





But that shame is slowly eroding. From behind the impenetrable cover of clouds the moon appears, and the land around me is lit. There you can begin to make out the faint outlines of ruins and abandoned houses, a windmill with two of its fans missing. A cow, emaciated and bleak-eyed, wags its tail stupidly beside the country road and lows.





This vista is your life and its ruins are what remain of your child-like innocence and hopes. Once it was a thriving civilization, but now it lies abandoned, and no human life comes here, only vultures and demons. You wandered about in the dark for a long time, unable to see anything, trying to find your way, groping, feeling blindly with your hands. Beginning Exodus 90 felt like having the clouds roll back to permit the light of the moon. At first, there was not much light. But slowly the mists parted and soon there was light enough to see where you are. Then you were able to orient yourself, and with your fellow men, you began a program of building. All the while, the moon wades slowly across the sky as it begins to make way for the sun.





This picture encapsulates the experience of going through Exodus 90. It is a combination of effort and patience. Of striving and sitting. Of quivering with thoughts and energy and excitement while having to stand perfectly still. Exodus 90 asks us both to act and to wait. To go and stop. To rise in anticipation and to sit again. It is the perfect picture of being asked to do nothing vigorously and energetically.





You are given very many, but perfectly simple, limitations and permissions. And then everything else is up to you. It is the terrifying view from a mountaintop: the perfect poise of standing needle-still on a high-ridged crest, with all the dizzying sensation of being a footstep away from plummeting to your death. What you do next is entirely up to you: you can kill yourself in an instant, and every moment that you don't keeps in your possession the vision before you.





One curiosity about Exodus 90 is that it reduced me initially to an inert lump. It is a cruel trick of the brain: when you are told to not think of an elephant, it may not be your first reaction to concentrate only on not thinking about an elephant. It was certainly my reaction to spend all my time and effort not thinking of an elephant.





I read and reread Sophocles' Antigone, Ajax, Philoctetes. For nearly-forty days I have thought of almost nothing else to do. This is the mind of an addict in recovery. When you take away the object of your obsession, you do not feel the exhilaration of freedom, but the vacuum of abandonment. So you sit there, stunned, uncertain of what to do next.





It has only come about very slowly that I have begun to think of new things to do. One was to read other books that aren't Greek tragedy. The other was to start this writing.





But I have begun to do these things. Suddenly the blank picture before you isn't an image of annihilation but of creative possibility. It isn't a prison but a passport. You can do whatever you want.





Exodus 90 is what I imagine dropping acid is like.





And that really is the perfect encapsulation of what freedom is supposed to be: a high. Slipping free from the chains of sin is only painful at first because we are co-dependent on sin. It makes us miserable, but we can't get enough of it. Only after an exodus in the disciplines of virtue do we begin to shake from our eyes the fatal delusions which have blinded us. Then our eyes begin to adjust. Then we begin to see life and all its glory.





I am not done Exodus 90 yet. I have not done Exodus 90 perfectly. I want to refrain from offering an easy conclusion which suggests that all my problems have been swept away. I'm sure they haven't. But I am also absolutely, positively certain that I saw the pressure-needle gauging my life twitch, just for a moment, away from the red and into the black.

I'm thirty-nine days into an ascetic exercise called. If you thought that was the name of a resurrected scene band from the early Noughts, you've come to the right place, my friend. But even though we aren't having a playback from wayback about teen boys with fake teardrops in their eyes, you'll still find plenty to cringe about when you discover just what's onplaylist.For 90 days you will: