Walking back to happiness…

What’s the most fun way to exercise?

I am not quite sure what this lady is appearing to be doing, via Photoshop. Presumably that’s bubblegum and she has overdone the inflation. But why is she wearing that odd brown raincoat? Thinking in advance about potential atmospheric conditions would imply an experiment rather than an accident. Actually thinking about a daft thing before you did it.

There was an actual person once – I remember reading about it/seeing a picture – who tied a lot of balloons – presumably filled with something stronger than oxygen – to the four corners of a kitchen chair, and sat on it. And rose high into the air… How did they get him down? Without actually popping balloons? Or maybe they did pop balloons…

There is this thing about exercise, isn’t there? People see it as a virtue to be constantly full of beans and raring to go. And if you’re not one of those mindless leotard-clad leapers-abouters you must be a couch potato. I see it more as a symptom of our having forgotten what we actually are – animals.

To me it seems that ‘exercise’ is a modern concept – at least modern in the sense of post-industrial revolution. I  think of all those generations of put-upon medieval peasants hacking and hoeing at the soil, struggling behind the plough, broadcasting the seed by hand, removing stones from the fields in the frozen depths of winter.

Further back still, I think of the little short lives of our earliest ancestors – how they had to hunt and track their food before they could eat it. And in both cases, how if a person wanted to be somewhere other than where they were, they would have set out to  walk, run, swim or climb.

So I think the most honourable sort of exercise is probably to be obtained through useful physical work – gardening, perhaps, or making/building something. And perhaps the best thing to do is assume  you have only your own body for getting from A to B – therefore you will resort to walking, running, swimming or climbing. Activities like that are free, or at least any expense incurred is more worthwhile than, say, membership of  a gym. They can be shared with other human-beings if required, and can produce a whole range useful results.