The thing I bought after my piano.

The thing I bought after my piano after I bought my house was my portable sauna.

It's a luxury item I firmly stand by.

This was the entirety of furniture in my house up to that point:

piano
piano bench
two folding chairs
a king sized blow-up bed

And that was all.

Classic.

Why would I buy a sauna before I even bought an actual bed?

Well…

When I was in college, my girlfriends and I decided that we were going to join Bally’s gym. Remember Bally’s? You know, before the two bankruptcies?

This location was one step past the border between Detroit and Dearborn going west on Michigan Avenue. You could hop onto one bus and go all the way there, and it would drop you off at the door. You could then work out, shower, leave the building, go across the street, and take one bus all the way back to the university.

I don’t think my girlfriends lasted even a month with that subscription, but I was a member from freshman year to graduate school.

And the hook was the steam room.

Oh, the steam room! Eucalyptus leaves and bamboo benches and thick towels and cucumber water just outside.

I'd attend a class that would make my spleen explode it was so difficult and then I would take a shower without touching the tan/brown tile sides or the weeping willow shower curtain and then…my reward.

Steam Luxury.

The personal benefits of the steam sauna were many. I slept better, I breathed more deeply, I concentrated better in class.

I was in my late teens/early twenties and hadn’t left the continent yet and there was no internet and I was reading mostly math stuff, comedy stuff, and more comedy stuff, so I had no idea this was a thing. I thought I had discovered this new modality that everyone should experience!

*deep grown-people sigh*

Turns out, in ancient African countries, saunas were used to help heal a sick person. The person would lie down on a contraption that was above hot coals in order to make them sweat. In Turkiye, the thousands-years old public hammams are famous for the cleaning rituals that accompany the steam. Jjimjilbangs, Korean spas, are a choose-your-own-adventure, where you can enjoy different types of wet and dry saunas as well as different types of food. Onsen are hot springs in Japan, and they also come in varieties from indoors to outdoors, from modern to more traditional. Finnish saunas were a way to get away from the cold and now are an integral part of their way of life.

So…I had not discovered a thing.

I had, however, made a covenant with myself, to wit:

I promised when I got my house, I would find a way to have a sauna or steam room or something like that within the first year of purchase.

And then…on the third day of the eighth month of the move-in, I took the couple hundred dollars I had scrounged together during a global pandemic and after two days’ delivery and an hour of assembly, my muscles were being relaxed from the inside with the aroma of eucalyptus filling the house.

And so it was.

P.S. I lied. This was educational.

Most of the things you see others enjoying can be enjoyed by you. The steam room can be as expensive as $10,000; I figured out how to get it on a smaller scale. When I’m relaxing in my sauna, I’m not lamenting about why I don’t have the whatever whatever.

I’m breathing clearly. I’m sleeping deeply. I’m concentrating better.

I did the same thing with the overhead projector—I saw someone with a lush theater room in their beautiful home and thought, “That’s a great idea!” A $45 cloth screen and a $50 overhead projector later (with a Bose plug-in speaker I already had), I’m watching Dr. Who and my entire wall from floor to ceiling is the screen.

Yas.

Go get your thing. Figure out how to do a good version of the actual version and then start enjoying your life, for real.

This type of mettle shows up in the classroom and the studio.