Five minutes, five things, zero dollars

I am in the mood to get stuff done quickly, so here are five things that are good for us that take five minutes or less and are free.  Go for it:

•      Drink some water.  Hydrated people are happy and healthy people.

•      Take some deep breaths.  It makes our stress level drop.

•      Stand up.  Too much sitting turns us into pumpkins.  Not literally.  But do it anyway.

•      Stretch.  This is something we all need to do more of.  Muscles like it.  It feels good.

•      Hug somebody.  If you can, take the whole five minutes.  So much good feeling!!!

Go outside and play

I believe in science.  I like modern medicine because here I am, a person who did not die of all the childhood diseases against which I was vaccinated, who survived two pregnancies with healthy outcomes for both me and the kids in spite of complications, and who needed pharmacological help with depression for years.

There are things, however, that medicine doesn’t do and science hasn’t figured out yet.  All the pills in the world are not going to make up for unhealthy food choices.  There is no drug to replace exercise.  For that matter, there’s no pharmaceutical substitute for hugs and the other human contact we need to survive.

Even when there are technological interventions, they always work better if we do the human stuff, too.  That knee replacement isn’t going to do much good if we shirk the physical therapy.  If we don’t change the lifestyle things that are causing the pain, we’re going to have to deal with drug side effects and maybe addiction as well.

It’s low-tech and not particularly exciting, but let’s eat the veggies and get sweaty and go outside to play.  That’s what life is made out of, even more than DNA and stardust.

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.