Wayne and Garth were wrong

This may not seem like good news, but I’m going to say it anyway:  none of us is more worthy because we work out.  I’m not saying that working out is not a good thing, or that we’re not worthy, just that the two things are not causally related in most cases.

Here’s the deal:  our culture runs around (not literally) peddling (pedaling?) (again, not literally) (the parentheses are running amok!) the idea that worth is something we have to work for rather than something we already have, intrinsically.  If only we put in the time at this career or get this education or eat this high fiber cereal or take 37 fitness classes a week, we will finally be worth loving, it says.  If we don’t, we are clearly lazy, spineless, fat, nonproductive slackers.  And, you know, the culture can sell us something to fix that.

I’m not buying.  We are all miracles, either of the gazillion-to-one odds of physics and chemistry and biology or of creation or both or something else—the point is the miraculousness.  We start from there.

With miracle as the beginning, we have much better choices.  We can think about what makes our bodies feel better and work better.  When we work out because we like being strong or because we have so much more fun dancing with our love or our kids or our friends when we have more energy or because we really like opening our own jars for the satisfying pop and the look of surprise on our dads’ faces, it becomes a pleasure, a gift to ourselves, not some dreary torture that we have to do in order to make it up one level of hell.

So no, I’m not going to hand out brownie points (or brownies, either, sorry…) for working out.  We have all the points we need.  I’m here to encourage everyone to be the most miraculous and joyful humans possible, which might mean a little sweat here and there.