Recovering this morning from several hours of cutting firewood yesterday, I have sore shoulders and lower back, and very tight legs. This old bod does not suffer without letting me know what excesses I have visited upon it. But persevere I must! Because just as the charmingly-named institution in the cover photo is my ultimate destination, the quality of the journey seems to me to be the more important consideration.

As a desk jockey in remission, I’m discovering the joys of actual physical work. Well, joys is perhaps a bit off the mark, but perhaps usefulness is better - because working the body maintains its health (within reason - over-working is probably worse than not working it at all). I used to be one of those who drove to the gym and put my body through its paces on a variety of machines, watching the teevee and keeping score on the machine-measures of work. All that energy burned up to produce nothing but vanity! A more absurd setup is hard to imagine, a pure luxury, an expression of disconnect and waste. Here the activity is just another consumer item in a store, to be consumed. Yes exercise is essential - but why not use that energy to accomplish actual work? In effect, we have relinquished actual work and substituted fake work.

These ideas and more are laid out in a book of essays by Katy Bowman. Here is a link to a review of the book. The problem of our bourgeois society, as Ms. Bowman so eloquently states:

“Our cultural relationship to movement is backwards: we champion (and financially reward) sedentary occupations at banks and think tanks while scowling at physical labor. The basic message is that if you have to use your body to earn your daily bread, you’re not worth much bread.”

And what has this gentrification wrought in our society? Obesity rates through the roof, diseases and conditions such as diabetes also, and despite the advances in pharmaceuticals and medicine in general last year life expectancy in these United States actually declined.

Something has to change. From the review:

“Humans evolved over millions of years thanks to movement. An emphasis on sedentarism in the wake of the Industrial Revolution has resulted in an entire industry of mismatch diseases. Humans have not defeated the elements, as we often believe. We have surrendered. Thus we treat exercise as medicine for poor habits. We construct chairs for weak spines and bulging middles, we drive a few blocks instead of walking—and since we barely walk, we pad our feet in sneakers that produce anatomical nightmares up the posterior chain to our neck—and then we hope four or five hours a week on a treadmill will even the playing field.

In Movement Matters Bowman offers numerous tips for rethinking your relationship to how and why you move. Just as we would not need anti-inflammatory drugs, statins, and surgeries if not for poor diets, our bodies would dramatically change if we moved more naturally and put that movement to constructive use. Our relationship to our bodies would change, as would how we understand and treat nature. That is the natural relationship of a human to movement.

“Movement should be something that you’re doing all of the time for yourself. That is the natural relationship of a human to movement. It’s like saying that breakfast is medicine for starvation. It’s not medicine; it’s just food. You’re supposed to be eating; it’s a biological requirement. The same holds true for movement.”