My English
teacher my junior year in high school, Mr. Johsens, was determined to make us
think. (He may have felt some
frustration in this task, taken out on us in his choices of reading, which were
uniformly depressing; if I were looking for a book list to encourage suicidal
tendencies, I might choose the books we read that year. He, however, remained consistently cheerful
and engaged. End of digression.) In the course of this thankless (until
now: thank you, Mr. Johsens, wherever
you are!) task, he spent a fair amount of time emphasizing the importance of
premises. All of our arguments begin
with the premises we choose. Among those
premises, we find the meanings we assign to particular words. Yes, I am getting to the point now.
We have to decide
what we mean by fitness. I can help my
clients become fitter, but that might mean something totally different to
different clients. One may want to lose
weight. Another may want to increase
mobility in the face of chronic disease.
Yet another might want to keep up with a perpetual-motion kid.
Let’s have that
conversation. Let’s figure out a fitness
goal that makes sense. Then we can get
there from here.
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