Category: human nature

Camping or Vamping?

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“There are no words that can tell the hidden spirit of the wilderness, that can reveal its mystery, its melancholy, and its charm.” –Theodore Roosevelt African Game Trails, 1910  

I came up with a word: boring.

When we say something like that, adventure-seekers and wildlife enthusiasts have two words to describe us: city slickers. That’s not good-natured ribbing either. It’s a harsh condemnation as far as they’re concerned, and we can feel their intent soon after they say it. We could try to defend ourselves, but what’s the point? It’s true. We are city slickers who prefer the creature comforts of city-life and technology, and we know it has probably made us all soft and gooey from the inside and out, but we can’t admit that. We have to pretend we’re strong, rugged individualists who could survive in the wild with nothing but a blade and a canteen, because we feel guilty for living the easy life, and we’re a little jealous of the experiences that hardened these outdoorsmen. Are they true survivalists though? Do they know enough to know what they’re supposed to know, or are they just making it up as they go along? Could they compete with a Theodore Roosevelt in the wild, in the harsh conditions he probably experienced, or are they a hybrid between those who are accustomed to modern conveniences and technology combined with our modern definition of the rustic, rugged life? Are they experienced campers or vampers? 

We all heed the call of the wild, and the need to step away from convenience and comfort to escape civilization and embrace our untamed/wild instincts to let our primal nature hang out for all to see. We know it’s just good for the soul to have experiences that teach us more about ourselves. “You’ll never know who you are, who you truly are, until you’re backed into a corner.” And that sounds so romantic that if we brought it up in front of a group, almost all hands would go flying up from those who want to join us on our planned expedition. Some hands will even turn into fists, as they shout, “Yeah, gimme some a that!” But the minute we start darkening spots on a calendar, those hands, smiles, and eyebrows all go down. “Something tells me I’m going to be busy.” 

The concepts behind achieving a true Theodore Roosevelt spirit, seeking adventure and meaning in nature is such a romantic notion that city-slickers can’t but help but want some of that for themselves for at least one weekend, but we always fail. “It doesn’t matter that you fail, because everyone fails at something or another in life. It’s what you do after failure that defines you.” We love that, all of it, but if we’re going to be honest with ourselves, our failure to become this generation’s Theodore Roosevelt will never bother us so much that we’re going to do whatever it takes to make it happen. 

Da Mudder Humper

We know mudder nature offers great solitude and beauty to the unsuspecting and suspecting, but how long how long we’re supposed to stand at the bottom of a mountain before it happens? How long does one quietly stand at the bottom of a mountain before we make a connection to its height and vastness—not just physically, but emotionally and spiritually? I’ve tried to experience it, but someone always interrupts me with, “Ok, are you ready?”  

“No, I’m not ready.” I say with indignation. “Hold on for a second.” This interrupter wanted to checkout prematurely, or what we considered a premature checkout, and we weren’t even halfway done, because we thought were close. “We drove all this way to see this mudder humper. Why don’t you go ahead and give me a second to appreciate her.” And we said that with solid conviction, but we didn’t really know how long we needed to convince them, or ourselves, that the very large mound of dirt and rocks inspired feelings of grandeur and timelessness within us to the point that we made that connection.

We don’t want to be a modern who looks at a mountain of breath-taking glory for twenty-two seconds and checks out and moved on. We want to feel, just for a moment, what our forebears must have experienced when they looked upon this mountain. We all think that the man of yesteryear was more in touch with nature than we are, because we’ve been too modernized. There is truth to that, of course, but did they appreciate the wonder of natural landmarks as much or more than we did? My guess is they didn’t view a mountain range as a breathtaking wonder in the manner we do, but as a pain in the ass that they were either going to cross or navigate around on foot or by horse-drawn carriage. 

***

Spotting nature’s finest critters in their environment, doing what they do, can also be awe-inspiring, but how often do we actually see them in the wild? “The one thing we know about nature with absolute certainty is that it’s unpredictable and unreliable,” a tour guide informed us when we didn’t see a single creature on our tour. If we’re lucky enough to actually see a wild animal in their environs, doing what they do, how many of those moments are inspiring or exciting. Most creatures of wild seem to spend about 75% of their time sleeping, 10% hiding from predators, and the rest of their time actively searching for food, eating that food, and sitting on their can doing nothing. If you’re lucky enough to see them during the percentage of the 15% of their time actively searching then you’re one of the lucky few. I’ve never been that lucky. 

When we see these incredible beasts in a zoo, we immediately think about how awful it is that they have to spend their existence in a caged environment, but if you’ve ever actually seen one of them in the wild, you know caged animals really aren’t missing that much. The wild ones live lives a lot more boring than most of us know. Their whole lives are about eating whatever they can find, sleeping about 15-20 hours a day, and occasionally finding someone to procreate with to extend the species. The caged animal not only sleeps the same amount of time, but they get free, non-taxing delivery of food, and they also have procreation partners delivered to them. The two things zoo patrons might characterize as the primary deprivations of the wild animal is mental engagement and physical exercise, which I think most wild animals would characterize as overrated. Our tour guide basically bolstered my characterizations when she informed us that one of the only ways they can get the wild animals out of their homes is by providing them salt licks, and they conveniently put them in areas where tourists can spot them. Yet, this only increases the chance that an animal will leave their home. It guarantees nothing. 

As a person who is more accustomed to seeing wild animals in action, it’s disappointing to see them do nothing but pant in bask of a sunrise. It’s a pretty decent picture, don’t get me wrong, but at some point you wouldn’t mind seeing what happens after a park ranger sets a mechanical rabbit loose, like they do at the dog tracks to set them in motion. If we got lucky enough to see them hunt or a fight LIVE! and IN ACTION!, and we see them ripping each other apart, we probably wouldn’t want to stick around long enough to see the unsanitary ways they rip entrails out of the loser’s anatomy. We prefer the packages our nature shows put together with their motion-sensitive cameras in the wild, and most of us can’t even last a full show, so we go to YouTube to watch the highlight reels. “It’s not the same,” the nature enthusiast will counter.

“It’s not,” we admit, “but I’ve spent some time in the wild, and I’ve seen these creatures in their habitat, doing what they do, and they’re so boring for such long stretches of time that my embarrassing reflex is to reach for the remote.”  

*** 

I don’t know if I loved camping in the outdoors (on a protected reserve) when I was a kid, or if I just remember my own highlight package, but I had a love/hate relationship with the wild. Back then, I feared, hated, and loved her dark, wooded regions. The creatures I imagined therein were not all earthly either. I had a vivid imagination, and I imagined that everything outside the campfire light was mysterious, had hidden spirits, and its own relative charm. Now that my imagination has lost some of its vividness, I know I likely would’ve found nothing if I dared venture beyond the campfire light into those dark, foreboding regions. And if I ever had the misfortune of running into one of the most fearsome beasts imaginable in that darkness, my guess is that they’d probably be more scared of me than I am of them, or asleep. I would never tell younger me any of that though, because I know those fears added to the charm of those camping trips, and I still feel that every time I smell burning wood.

When we get older, but not so old that we lose our imagination, we try to recapture the magical charm camping once held for us. The problem is that our parents handled most of the particulars of camping when we were very young, so we needed to find a friend who was a more experienced camper. We searched for that fella or female who knew how to help us, and when we finally found him, we found that the biggest difference between an experienced camper and an inexperienced one is mostly about the tent. Our experienced camper put up quite a few tents in his day, but he wouldn’t put our tent up for us. He didn’t want to deprive us of the sacred rite of passage involved in putting up a first tent, which was the whole reason we invited him to our camping expedition. When we were done, he laughed at us, and he pulled the stakes out another half-inch. “That’s it,” we asked ourselves. “That’s the difference between an experienced camper and an inexperienced one?”

No, that’s not it, he brought a flashlight. “You forgot a flashlight?” he asked with disgust. “You, my friends, are inexperienced campers,” he said. We felt insecure about our lack of knowledge, and we felt some shame for being so unprepared. Feelings of shame are usually followed by some form of rebellion, and we felt that bubbling to the surface, but our experienced camper was not very attractive, he was out of shape, and he was a subpar employee in our company who didn’t have many friends, so we let him wallow in his camping superiorities.

Once we managed to get past the tent and supplies portion of the camping routine, we all decided to go fish. Our experienced camper was also an experienced fisherman, and he did not appreciate us doing the only thing inexperienced fisherman love about fishing: casting. We were casting for distance, and we were casting to break up the boredom of fishing. We also reasoned that because the lake was full of moss and weedy, frequent casting kept it more debris-free. Plus, we didn’t want the fish nibbling our nightcrawler off the line. “What are you doing?” he whispered at us in disgust. “You should be recasting 5-7 minutes apart at the very least.” When we asked him why, our question was a respectful one that ceded to his authority. He explained his rationale, and it was a rather generic answer that involved the frequency of the recast depending on the bait type, water conditions, and target species. When we attempted to explore with more specifics, he tried to answer, but his answers didn’t satisfy us, so we kept asking. “Stop talking,” he spat in whisper, “you’re scaring the fish away.” We respectfully waited beyond reason to speak again, and when we did, he repeated: “Stop talking, you’re scaring the fish away.” We tried to display respect, through more silence, but when we got too bored and tried whispering things to him, he moved to the other side of the lake. Our takeaway was that while camping is boring, but fishing is mind-numbing.

When we extinguished our campfire at the end of the night, our experienced camper brought out an inflatable mattress, which we considered a cardinal sin of the camping world, until he followed that with a Flextailgear Max Pump Three that promised to “inflate the standard inflatable mattress in under two minutes with a 5,000 Pascal pressure rating and a built-in camping light.” We read that off the box to our experienced camper and asked him what his patron saint of outdoorsiness, Theodore Roosevelt, would think of an inflatable mattress with a Flextailgear Max Pump Three. 

“I don’t care,” he said. “There’s no way I’m sleeping on that cold hard ground.”

It’s not for me, but I respect anyone and everyone who tries to “ruff it” in the wild, but what does “ruffing it” mean? It’s relative to the person of course, but we all know that minor level of sensory deprivation nature provides can yield a certain sense of peacefulness, as we attempt to connect with nature and ourselves. It’s a momentary escape from the distractions we so enjoy. Once we’re done with that relatively quiet walk through a trail in a wooded region, we ask ourselves what’s the difference between a true outdoorsman, an adventure seeker, an experienced camper, and someone who never travels outside the city? Our guide, teacher, experienced camper or vamper, knew his stuff, but how much stuff is there to know when we go out camping? He improved the taughtness of our tent by moving it about a half-inch, he remembered a flashlight, and he knew enough not to talk while fishing, but he also brought modern conveniences that would’ve made the experienced outdoorsman of yesteryear groan. He didn’t help us renew our appreciation of anything, unless we’re talking about our renewed appreciation for the controlled climate an HVAC can provide, the appliances that provide convenience and comfort, and our devices. When we’re nestled back in our comfortable homes, we appreciate not being smashed into by bugs, as when they see a campfire light, they think it’s a moon, they fly kamikaze-style into it. The june bugs, in particular, don’t seem to care that something as big as a human face stands between them and the light. When we’re in the comfy confines of our home, we also know that nothing is going to stick its disgusting, grimy little proboscis in us to suck blood out of our system. More than anything else, our camping trip gave us a renewed appreciation of our sense of home. Theodore Roosevelt would not have approved of any of this, but the only word we could find to describe “hidden spirit of the wilderness, that can reveal its mystery, its melancholy, and its charm” was boring, and hot and sticky, oh! and the two words ‘never again,’ sorry, Teddy.

The Quiet Quirky Clues to Our Core

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A baby, in the arms of her father, watched a line of adults proceed by her in church. She watched them proceed past with little interest. She watched them as I watched her, both of us looking at nothing until something caught our eye. Something caught her eye. She went from absently looking at people to intense focus. I turned to see what caught her attention. It was another daughter being held by her father in a different manner. The watcher and the watchee locked eyes for a couple seconds, and the moment passed, or so I thought. The watcher then wriggled herself into another position. “What are you doing?” her father whispered, looking down at her movements and adjusting his arms according to her wishes. When she was done finagling her fathers’ arms to her wishes, she ended up in the exact same position as the watchee in her father’s arms. I found her exposé into the human condition fascinating, because it suggested that keeping up with the jonses is just plain human nature, as opposed to learned behavior.

What does it mean? Does her mimicry reveal our innate need to achieve conformity, or the thought that we, even when very young, believe everyone else is doing it better?

***

Ever shake hands with a young kid, say seven-to-nine-years-old? They put their hand out vertical, but they add no grip, and their completion of the ritual is almost robotic. Adults apply meaning to this superficial, symbolic ritual. Kids just do what they’re told, the way we did when we were kids. They don’t know any better, we do. Yet, if we know better, what do we know? We think we gain special insight into a man by the way he shakes another man’s hand, but what do we gain? How hard is it to fake a great handshake?

“I never respected a man who didn’t shake a man’s hand,” my father-in-law said. “If a fella gives you a firm, but-not-too-firm handshake, and he looks you in the eye while he’s doing it, you know he’s a man’s man, and a man you can trust” 

“Fair enough,” I said, “but can it be faked?” It was a leading question, but I was also so curious about this staple of the insightful man’s definition of a man he thought he could trust on sight. 

“You can feel it,” he said.

That seemed preposterous to me, but he had a closing tone that suggested further interrogation on my part would be viewed as disrespectful. It was not my intention to be disrespectful, as I knew this man knew ten times more about reading people than I’ll ever know. He spent a forty-year career learning the difference between honest people and deceitful ones, and he was, by all accounts, very good at his job. 

I didn’t think my other questions were disrespectful, but the more I thought about it, the more I realized that they were leading questions that asked him if he knew how wrong he was. So, I just shut it.

If I continued down this path, I would’ve told him about the weasel I met who knew how to shake a man’s hand, and he was so good at it that I thought, ‘Now that’s a handshake.’ I never put much stock in handshake readings, but this man had such a great handshake that it influenced my first impression. The weasel then spent the next twenty minutes trying to find creative ways to get me to part with my money. Piece of junk is what he was, but he had a nice, firm handshake, and he looked me in the eyes while he did it. I’ll give him that.

What does it mean? We think it’s a little cute that a young one doesn’t understand the complexities involved in the hand shake, and we dismiss the child’s failure to provide any data to our information-gathering exercise. As we age, we learn that a proper handshake conveys trust and respect, but some of us learn how to fake this customary ritual to mislead people. Relying on the knowledge we’ve attained from the meaning behind a great handshake is flawed. I’d much rather talk to them, watch them, and read them to learn the refrain in their brain.

***

“I wish I had all the money and love that guy had,” a young feller said referring to an NBA player who happened to be the son of a former NBA player. To paraphrase the Tina Turner song, What’s [Money] Got to do With It? Money can buy us all sorts of things, but there comes a point when the power of money ends.

At some point, money becomes an afterthought. Once we have enough money to support us for the rest of our lives, it’s “one less thing to worry about,” as the Forrest Gump character said. Name recognition is another powerful tool, as it can open doors for us, but once we’re in, we’re in. What do we do then? If we don’t have game, at some point, no one cares what our name is. Money can’t buy respect from our peers in school, at the workplace, or on the court. That’s where names are made and lost. When we fail, money won’t help people forget. Love and an excellent support system are the coin of the realm there. When I failed in school, the workplace, and in athletics, I would’ve loved it if someone said, “You’re going to fail, it’s what we do, it’s what we do the moment after we fail that defines us.” I would’ve also loved it if they added, “And when you fail, just know that you have me, the person who cares more about what happens to you than anyone else in the world, standing right behind you.”

What does it mean? We all know those cynical types who think that in one way or another, money solves everything. My guess is this is said most often by cynical types who never had any, because it is an excellent excuse to explain to ourselves why they haven’t measured up. We could list all of the players in our culture who never had a dime growing up, but that would be redundant. We all know that money does not help us deal with momentary failures, but we have to admit that if we didn’t have what we believed to be a quality excuse those temporary failures could crush us. If quality excuses help us get over speed bumps, what do we do then? Most of the successful people, I’ve met tell me stories of their no-money, no friends in high places rise, and I’ve heard a number of tales that detail trials and errors, and rock bottom, insomnia-rich, where-do-I-go-from-here failures that eventually lead to success. “How?” will be your first question, and your second question will be an unspoken, “What’s the difference between you and me?” Where did their inner drive come from? Their answers will usually be a frustrating amount of nothing really, except that they had an unwavering spirit behind them, often a parent, who provided support, guidance, love, and a whole bunch of other elements that taught them that momentary failure is nothing more than a learning experience.

***

I hear parents rewrite their past all the time at their kid’s baseball games. Mythologizing ourselves into an ideal image is just kind of what we do when we’re watching our kids play ball. This “They’re not as good as we were,” mentality helps us control the narrative of our lives by highlighting our character-defining moments to attempt to rewrite our character. Yet, when we’re telling our kids about the seminal, pivotal memories of our lives, how often do we “misremember” key details that never made it into our highlight reels? When we see our kids act in a somewhat less than aggressive manner, we’re despondent. “That’s not how I did it!” we say. Is that true? It is, because it’s how we remember it. It’s possible that we remember it correctly, but it’s more probable that we remember our highlight reels as opposed to our reality. It’s also possible that we’ve rewritten our past so thoroughly that that is genuinely how we remember it. I do this, you do it, we all do it. Our grandparents probably did it to our parents, our parents do it to us, and we do it to our kids. It’s so common that we could probably call this chain of rewrites human nature at this point. 

What does it mean? Our rewrites are an attempt to correct the past that we think might help us correct our present and future. They’re not lies, however, as we genuinely believe them after reviewing our highlight reels. Yet, the best rewrite we could possibly write is the one in which we try to escape the clutches of this chain. It could alter our kids future if we rewrote the mistakes our parents made with us. We may not want to recount our failures for them, but we could talk about how we dealt with adversity, moments of embarrassment, and humiliation. We could offer them a love and support rewrite that includes our own version of the “And when you fail…” note of support listed earlier that we wish our parents offered us?    

***

Alan “the neighbor” offered Ben “the neighborhood teenager” some advice on his game. The Ben, in our scenario, forgot everything Alan said two seconds after he’s said it, which made Ben the perfect repository for Alan’s otherworldliness worldliness. I wanted to tell Alan to “Save it” about halfway through his spiel, because other, more prominent types in Ben’s life offered him similar advice, and he didn’t listen to them either. Ben was all about achieving independence, or at least a level that made him immune to responding to advice. I didn’t say anything, because I knew this really wasn’t about Alan helping Ben improve his game. Allen just wanted to display his unique understanding of the human condition to us.

What does it mean? We all offer one another advice, and we all politely avoid listening to those who are kind enough to offer us some advice. Not only do I know people who act this way, I know I am one of them. There are a variety of reasons and excuses for why we don’t listen to anyone, but my advice to people who give advice is, “Save it! No one’s listening.” That’s dumb advice I know, because when we spot a flaw in someone’s game, or in someone’s life, some of us sincerely want to help them, and we can’t avoid trying to prove the knowledge we’ve attained along the way. The problem with us hearing such advice is that most of us believe doing the same thing over and over will eventually produce different results.  

***

We all try to help one another when we spot flaws, but you ever tried to get a senior citizen’s mind right on a passion project of yours? When I watch it happen a big, neon-flashing “SAVE IT!” crosses my mind. You have an opinion, we have an opinion, and the only thing that keeps some of us going is the belief that their opinion is uninformed, because it goes against our sources. Before we go about getting their mind right however, we might want to consider the demographic of our audience. Marketers have what they call a key demo, and they pay big bucks for ad space in a show that appeals to audiences between the ages of 18-49, because their intense market research suggests that they’re still susceptible to suggestion.

When we’re under 18, we’re even more susceptible to suggestion, but we don’t have any money. The 49+ demo have all the money, but advertisers don’t waste the corporation’s time or money trying to persuade them, because through market research they’ve learned that the 49+ mind is already made up. I’ve met the anecdotals, my aunt was an anecdotal. She thought adhering to the prevailing winds of change gave her a more open-minded presentation, and she hoped it made her appear fresh, hip, and younger. It didn’t, but she got a lot of mileage out of being anecdotal. Generally speaking, the +49ers stubbornly adhere to the patterns they’ve developed, and all the routines and rituals they’ve had for a majority of their lives.

What does it mean? Market research dictates that most of the 49+ demo is so loyal to the products they’ve consumed for years that they’re branded. So, go ahead and tell them your opinions, because that’s your right, but just know that you’re probably wasting your breath if you think you’re going to get their minds right on your pet topic, because they’ve aged out of anyone ever changing their mind on anything. If you disagree, go ahead and ask someone who spends millions trying to tap into the culture and reach the widest audience possible. The marketing agencies, and various marketing departments of corporations have decided that pouring millions into advertising to +49ers is equivalent to pouring money down the drain.

Once you’ve arrived at your conclusion, you might want to join me in my quest to get marketing teams to stop directing a portion of their advertising budgets to streaming services. If that fails, we should focus on getting them to offer a +49 opt out on button on commercials for those who’ve aged out of the key demo, because their beloved fast-forward thumbs are developing callouses.

I Hate Working Out!

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“I hate working out!” Jack LaLanne once said in an interview I heard him give before he passed.

I remember when I was young, and I didn’t have to workout. I could look good, feel good, and my body was a well-honed machine without it. I call those days the glory days. I didn’t workout as often as I should’ve, because it was boring. It was also painful. If you do it right, you should experience a little pain. “Who told you that?” workout fanatic John Johnson asked. “That might be the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard.”

“It sounds dumb on the surface,” I said, “but if you finish working out without some pain, what some call a small, satisfying amount of pain, you know that you didn’t do it right that day.” John Johnson refused to concede the point, but when he finished he gave one of those thousand yard stares that told me he was thinking about what I said.  

There were times when I went through runs. I’d work my way into a 2-3 times a week workout week, but it wasn’t biologically required. Now that I’m old, I work out as much as I didn’t when I was young, and I hate every minute of it. 

I know, I know, you love it, but that’s probably because you’re not doing it right now. You love the effects of it, and I feel you, because I know how great it makes me feel, how energetic I feel, and how great peak, physical health feels, but while you’re doing it? C’mon! We do it, because we know we have to do it, but that doesn’t mean we have to like it. 

I hate it, you hate it, we all hate exercising, and now we find out that Jack LaLanne, the guy who gained fame for reportedly working out two hours a day, every day of his life, hated it. “Every minute of it,” he said. LaLanne went on to talk about why he did it anyway, and all of the benefits of doing it anyway, but the soundbite remains. He didn’t go into details on why he hated working out, but we can all guess that it had something to do with the fact that it’s painful, and painfully repetitive and boring.

A good book, a podcast, or an energetic heavy metal album can make working out less tedious, but physical fitness experts tell us that doing that is a mistake. “If you want the optimum results from a workout,” they say. “You need to mentally and physically maintain a focus on the muscles, or the muscle groups, that you’re working on. If you seek optimum results, you’ll workout without distraction.” My guess is that they’re talking about weight training exclusively, because what difference does it make if we’re distracted on a treadmill?  

I also consider working out relatively unrewarding. I see the benefits in my mood, my energy levels, and on my health, but I’m in a good mood today, and I’m in good health, as I write this. Good health is the norm, we don’t appreciate it, and we take it for granted. While we’re experiencing our relative definition of peak physical conditioning, it can prove difficult to keep it going. After a while, we realize there is no higher peak, there’s only sustaining the peak, and that can be relatively unrewarding. Even though it’s completely logical to want this to last longer, we begin to consider this feeling the new norm, and we don’t have the urgency to keep it going. I think we all experience this to varying degrees, but I didn’t comprehend the totality of it, until I ran into an old friend at my gym. 

“Have you ever had a bad back?” Imelda asked me at the gym. “It goes away, right? What if it didn’t? What if you experienced the worst back pain every day of your life for years? What would you do if you saw every expert, in every field you could think up, and they couldn’t help you? I am not a suicidal person, but I was in such horrible pain, for so long that I thought this was my life now. I just didn’t see how I could go on like that.” Imelda said, alluding to the fact that the idea of suicide crossed her mind. She eventually found a savior, a massage therapist who informed her that there were limits to what she could do for her. “You need to learn how to help yourself?” this message therapist told her. The message therapist put her on a workout plan at the gym. “It took a while,” Imelda informed me, “and when I say a while, I mean a while for me to endure the excruciating pain of working those muscles out to find some relief, and it took a while after that to achieve something close to normalcy.” After seeing those benefits, Imelda began working out every day, and she informed me that she hadn’t missed a day in about three years. “I live in fear that if I miss a day, I’ll be back on the floor screaming in pain, and I’m not going back. I’m never going back.”

Imelda informed me that I knew nothing about pain, real pain. I only made it to the gym when I was feeling particularly sluggish. To Imelda, it was about improving her quality of life, and she was either so grateful for the benefits, or fearful of returning to ground-bound pain that she was afraid to miss a day for years. The rest of us can’t help but take good health for granted. 

How long does a physical peak from an excellent workout last? About as long as our workout sabbatical? Peak physical condition, for most of us, usually follows some sort of health scare, or at least a moment of concern. We beat and abuse our body until it hurts, and we workout to recover. When we get back into peak, physical form, we start the cycle all over again.  

“See, to me, you go to the health club, you see all these people, and they’re working out, and they’re training, and they’re getting in shape, but the strange thing is, nobody’s really getting in shape for anything. The only reason that you’re getting in shape is so you can get through the workout.” –Jerry Seinfeld.

Those of us who hate working out on a regular basis love jokes like these, and we repeat them as often as we can. We also love articles that state, “No one really needs to undergo intense weight training four days a week. Some of the times, all we need is a low impact, low stress, long walk.” It’s true, but how true is it? Is it a convenient truth that we use to avoid stressful, rigorous workouts that can prove painful. Depending on our age, we need to stress and strain our muscles a little, maybe as little as two times a week for fifteen minutes a day. “That’s it?” That’s it, but they need to be intense workouts. They should involve some strain and some pain. 

We also don’t workout as often as we should because we’re lazy, undisciplined, and we can think of about 10,000 other things we’d rather do. I’m not on restart day. Restart day is not always on a Monday, but let’s just call it Monday. When Monday rolls around, I enter full workout mode. I listened to all of my excuses last week, and I just got tired of hearing all of that complaining. One of the first things that happens on restart day, soon after I lift that first barbell, I begin thinking about how often I will be working out this week. Even though this is the first time I’ve worked out in weeks, I immediately think that I’m actually, finally going to break my lifelong record of working out four different times in one week. I’m excited, because I’m actually working out, and I think the streak I really haven’t started yet will never end. I buy into the notion that this time it will all be different. When Tuesday rolls around though, I’m just a little too sore to work out again. It’s not a lie, but it’s not really the truth either. We don’t lie to ourselves, but we do fib. It’s more of a convenient truth. On Wednesday, I have something else to do, but that’s all right, because I still have Thursday and Friday, and I have all of that free time on Saturday and Sunday. Before I know it, I haven’t worked out in weeks again, and I have to start the dreaded restart.  

The restart is embarrassing and shameful, because we know we didn’t really do anything during those weeks when we could’ve been working out. We lost the discipline we showed that Monday, and we’re a little mad at ourselves for giving all that up. So, how do we get that discipline back? We buy it in the form of a gym membership. By buying that membership we’ll be putting our money where our mouth is. Making that financial commitment will surely up our personal level of commitment.

“I can’t tell you how many people buy gym memberships on January second, and they don’t show up again after about January twenty-second,” a friend and former gym employee once told me. “Our gym was always packed in January. We had to teach loyal customers the policies our gym has for time spent on machines and wait times, because they never had to learn them throughout the prior year. This was not much of a problem by February, as most of the crowds thinned out, and by March it was pretty much back to the same faces we saw throughout the previous year.”  

If we are one of the few honest enough to cancel the gym membership we’re no longer using, we might supplant it with an in-home machine or gym.

“Yeah, be careful what you spend on those,” he said, “because you can’t buy discipline.”

These at-home machines are a physical showcase of our discipline, and we’re not afraid to parade our friends around them, but the only exercise they offer us, after the initial push, pedal, and pull, is when we dust them off before our friends arrive. These machines and home gyms are also not only expensive, they take up a lot of space in our homes, because we’ll never resell these products for that would be an admission of failure beyond cancelling a gym membership.

The reward of a good workout is not the workout, as most of us hate every minute of it. No, we look forward to the end. We do everything we can think of, while in the midst of it, to occupy our mind and time until the end, but if we don’t start, we don’t have to long for the end. I know once I start, I won’t be able to end for hours, so why start? Well, how old are you?

If we’re not yet forty, that beautiful machine we call our body is still an incredible machine. For most of us, it’s still resourceful, adaptive, and able to recover from just about anything we put into it. Depending on our lack of activity, we may not see much diminishment until the big 44 hits. According to the scientists at Stanford University and Nanyang Technological University in Singapore when an individual hits forty-four-years of age, they will experience a serious drop off in physical ability. It’s the first age, they say, when we’ll experience the first number of effects of age. At age forty-four and then sixty, we will see two huge drop-offs in physical ability, they observe.

“Aging is no longer viewed as the gradual, linear regression we’ve all believed for so long,” they conclude, “it happens in two huge drops.”

“So, if I’m not yet forty-four-years-old,” you say, “I have nothing to worry about?” You are correct, if you believe the study, but there’s that stubborn, little asterisk labeled routine. As I wrote earlier, most of us will not establish a bona fide workout routine, until we experience a health scare. If those scientists are correct, that health scare will probably occur somewhere around our 44th birthday. That’s right, the day of reckoning that so many talk about will hit, and you might want to do everything you can now to prepare for it.  

Are you going to wake on the morning of your 44th birthday with a barbell in hand? Of course not, you’re going to do what you did on your 24th and 34th birthday. You’re going to continue to do what you do. It’s what we all do. You’re best proactive measure is to develop a routine that incorporates some weight training, and I’ve read that some can mean, depending on the person, as little as two workouts a week for as little as fifteen minutes a day. You are also correct, again according to the study, that if you pick up a weight on your 44th birthday, and you develop a healthy relationship with it going forward, you might be just fine. Are you that disciplined? Can you turn it on and off, like a light switch. If you can, you’re a better man than I am.

I don’t care who you are, or what age, working out just plain sucks, and anyone who says different is either lying or so disciplined that I just cannot relate with them. Check that, if we’re talking in hypotheticals, most people talk about the glories of a rigorous workout, how they feel so alive after a great workout, and they do it so often that it’s almost a competition. “I work out four days a week, and I work out with various weights, leg, arms, chest, and back alternately. I’d rather be on an elliptical or under a barbell than anywhere else in the world. It makes me feel so alive!” Are they lying or exaggerating? Hard to tell, but if they were as alive as they claim to be, they’d probably look more alive. If they were more honest, they’d say, “I hate working out, it’s boring, but I do it for all of the health benefits, and the effects it has on my mood, but I can think of about 10,000 things I’d rather do than lay on another bench, pick up a barbell for the umpteenth time in my life, or walk on a treadmill to watch the hundredths of a mile pass by in agonizingly slow progressions.”