Pandemic Bare Minimum

We are all really tired, I think, of living in pandemic times.  It’s boring.  It’s frustrating.  It’s stressful in so many ways.

 

Under the circumstances, it is tempting to give up.  Sure, ice cream is a breakfast food.  Why should I even try to work out?  I don’t really have the right stuff and no one sees me anyway and besides, I’m tired from watching that new streaming show about great lawns of the world until three in the morning.  What the heck, I’ll get together with my friends—I see so many people’s posts about it and none of them are sick, so what can it hurt?  And I’ve really had it with my glasses fogging up—I’m just not doing the mask thing any more.

 

Let’s resist the temptation.

 

The only way through these terrible times is by consistent good decisions.

 

And yes, this is about fitness.  We can’t be fit if we are dead.  We use the same kind of science-based thinking to deal with the pandemic that we do when we decide what kind of workouts to do.  We have to use the same motivational techniques to get us through the not-always-pleasant process to reach our happy future.

 

Our bare minimum fitness right now is:  stay home as much as possible, wear a mask whenever we have to go out, and do not gather with our friends and loved ones who do not live with us.  If we manage to do this minimum, we’ll all live to the next workout.

 

And if we don’t want to do it for ourselves, we need to do it for others.  We want our parents, our kids, our neighbor with cancer, our immunocompromised coworker, everyone to make it out of this.  Exercising our empathy is always a good workout.