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We are what we repeatedly do.
So I pick my slug self up and go for a walk. Pretty soon I’ve got two legs working, warmed up, moving, and I’m a homo sapien again. One capable of walking, running, and jumping. I could even cycle the backroads or bushcrash up a big hill. But really what I’ve done is come back to full aliveness within my body.
At the very beginning we were hunter-gatherers. Think about it. That meant a lot of moving about every day, day after day. Ever since we began as a species we moved. To be human is to be active.
And interestingly we now as a species have entered into what I think of as the ‘big experiment.’ What happens when humans stop moving, when they make hypokinesis or disuse a normal state?
The experiment is not taking a long time to manifest results. Lifestyle-related health problems are showing up in our young. Children are obese. They have heart disease. They have joint problems.
Consider this. Every time you get active you feel better as blood circulates around your system, your muscles warm, and your neurons start firing. And your brain works better too as it clears out all the sedentary clutter that’s collected while you were playing at being a couch potato.
It doesn’t take much exercise at all to gain health benefits. Head out for a half-hour walk five days a week. Or start smaller and work up to that. Go for a ten-minute walk. Do some stretching. Stand on your tiptoes and reach up to the ceiling. Touch the ground. Take back what is rightfully yours, the full and absolute use of your beautiful and complex human body. The one designed to hunt bear, deer, moose, rabbit, and partridge all without help of a gun. The one designed to dig down and to reach up while gathering all kinds of edibles.
Consider seriously the line, We are what we repeatedly do.
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Photo Credit: Carlos Sillero
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