When Harry and I started this project, we thought it was all going to be pretty simple. Which it is, ultimately, but it gets a little complicated in places. Which is why we think it’s a good idea to set out one simple rule at this point. A rule to follow when all else fails, to follow when you’re going to hell, to follow when you’ve forgotten the dog’s name. Call it Harry’s First Rule.
It goes like this: Exercise six days a week for the rest of your life. Sorry, but that’s it. No negotiations. No give. No excuses. Six days, serious exercise, until you die. And do not kid yourself that this is a lad’s law that doesn’t apply to women. If anything, it applies with more urgency. It is the great life-saver and life enhancer for women, even more than for men. So just do it. If you’re still in your forties and stretched to the breaking point with work and kids, commuting, soccer games and your own aging parents, we can talk about four or five days, but six is much better even then. And after age fifty, six is mandatory. By then the tide is starting to pick up and you need help staying off the rocks. In fact, my version of the rule would have been “Exercise hard six days a week,” but Harry convinced me that that would scare the horses.
This is not an exercise book for old girls. It’s not an exercise book at all. And it is possible that Harry’s First Rule is not our most important piece of advice. But this is where you begin. Do this and all else follows. It really does. Sounds weird, but it’s absolutely true. Following this rule, and seeing the early results, spins your head around. It opens you up to seeing the Next Third of your life differently.
Tell you a story. I had a wonderful aunt, Katherine Butler Hathaway, who was a hunchback and a dwarf and who wrote an astonishing book in 1942 called The Little Locksmith, about magic and transformation. She believed in magic and courage and iron determination as agents to transform your life. As she, amazingly, transformed hers. She had “an island in the palm of [her] hand,” a magic loop in the fate line that she clutched to herself, a magic amulet, all through an appalling and agonizing childhood. And, in her thirties, it worked and her life was utterly transformed. She went off to Paris, wrote books, fell in love (which she had been told was out of the question), married and had an intense if foreshortened life. She died at fifty—in agony, I’m afraid—just as she finished the book. It was an extraordinary, posthumous success.
It is called The Little Locksmith because there was a locksmith in Salem, Massachusetts, who came to the house from time to time when Aunt Kitty was a little girl, to silently fix the locks. He was a figure of fascination and dread to her all during the nine years when she was literally strapped to a special bed (with a five-pound weight attached to her head), in a long, painful and ultimately fruitless effort to save her. Save her from becoming what the locksmith had always been . . . a hunchback and a dwarf.
You’ve heard the old line, which she quotes, “Love laughs at locksmiths.” Love laughed at my Aunt Kitty for a very long time . . . until she transformed herself. The Little Locksmith is a beautiful and compelling book and of course a family treasure. It is still in print; if you read it, the little girls are my sisters and Lurana is my mother. It may explain why we are all such profound believers in magic and transformation. We have seen it.
All right, back to business. Exercise is magic. I’m absolutely serious. It gives you the strength, the optimism, the flexibility to do the rest. It is the amulet you squeeze in your palm to change yourself from the apathetic, crippled and exhausted creature you might otherwise become into something quite different. Someone transformed.
This sounds like craziness, but it’s not. There is craziness in our lives—that tide, those Darwinian imperatives that have nothing to do with modern life—but exercise is the opposite of crazy. It is the thing you use to drive the craziness away. Think about it again. Here is this nutty tide, right inside your own precious body, that wants you to get old and fat and sick and stupid. Wants you to fall down, talk nonsense, break your hip . . . get the sniffles, get the blues. Wants to sweep you up on the beach, where the gulls and the crabs are waiting to eat your guts. That’s what’s crazy. Doing something about it is sane. Exercise is sane. Better than sane . . . it’s magic.
Some guy—probably a jerk—told me that women, more than men, like the idea of pills, potions and gadgets to cure all ills. All right, think of exercise as a one-a-day pill. A feel-good pill that ought to be illegal but isn’t. You take it every single day, and it makes you feel absolutely great. Right away. No matter how crappy and self-pitying you felt when you took it. There are no side effects except good ones. And it always, always works. You can pop ’em for years and years and never grow immune, never need to up the dosage to dangerous levels. And if you get addicted—as you almost certainly will—you’ll be lucky. How about that?
If you want to be a little more scientific, think of doing exercise as sending a constant “grow” message to override that crazy tide. Think of it as telling your body to get stronger, more limber, functionally younger, in the only language your body understands. Because that is exactly what it does. And it works. It is the only thing that works.
Harry and I are not dopes. We do not think you’re going to slap the book down at this point and run out the door to the gym. But we think eventually you’ll do exactly that, which is why we are now going to tell you a couple of things that will help get you thinking the right way. In later chapters we’re going to tell you exactly what kind of exercise to do, and how much, and how to use your heart monitor, for heaven’s sake—more detail than you can bear. But forget that for now. For now we want to set you up so that you at least have a shot at starting what we recognize is a revolutionary regimen . . . a wild change in the way you live your life. Read this next bit on spec. Before long, you may want to take a serious stab at the life we’re peddling, and this will be helpful.
This next bit is fascinating, if tricky, stuff. The information is preliminary and anecdotal, but there begin to be indications that real exercise can be a significant help to some people who are dealing with depression. No one argues that steady, serious exercise doesn’t improve your mood, not just in the short term but over time. But the news may be better than that. I backed into this subject when a friend told me that a depressed relative of hers was part of a medical school study of exercise and depression and that exercise seemed to be working. Then, oddly enough, a close friend wrote me a note that same week that looked, at first, like an ordinary “fan letter.” Except that she is not an ordinary person and this was not an ordinary letter. It was about depression.
Smart, able and accomplished, this woman has wrestled with grave depression for all of the twenty-five years that she and her husband and I have been friends. And hers has not been just “I’m-blue-and-not-having-a-nice-time” depression. It’s been “I’ve-got-this-rock-on-my-chest-and-cannot-get-out-of-bed-for-weeks” depression. Serious business. She had tried absolutely everything—therapy, the full panoply of drugs, what have you—and had had a certain amount of luck. But the results were uneven. She was still tormented much of the time and incapacitated some of the time. Then she took up a really serious exercise regimen. After reading Younger Next Year, interestingly enough . . . hence the letter. She had been a standout athlete as a girl but had been inactive since she was nineteen, so it was a huge undertaking. (Here’s an interesting sidelight: she did not take up one of the normal regimens we suggest. She started hiking the Appalachian Trail. Like a lunatic. It changed her life, and now it’s spinning class, biking, a whole range of other exercise activity.) Within a couple of months, she had what she and her husband both see as a major turnaround—the best luck she’s had with any single approach in twenty-five years of trying. They don’t know if it will last, but for now they are talking “miracles.”
Incidentally, she has lost twenty pounds and looks terrific, but it goes way beyond that. To an outside observer, she is simply a different woman. Her husband e-mailed me yesterday to say she had casually asked him that morning if he wanted to do a quick twenty-mile bike loop before church. That is an absolutely astonishing, tear-inducing bit of news. She would no more have suggested that a year ago than she would have suggested that the two of them fly around the house for an hour. A transformation.
Caveat! This is just a story, not news of some cure. If you suffer from medical depression, for God’s sake, stay with your doctor, stay with your meds and don’t go traipsing after this as if it were some panacea. It is not. This is an anecdote, not “evidence” of anything. My pal still swears by her meds, which brought her to the threshold of what she is doing now. Be cautious.
But here’s some great, safe advice. Regardless of how the scientific inquiry turns out, try exercise anyway. It can only help. If it does not “cure” your depression, fine. It will still make you feel a hell of a lot better and it will radically improve your physical health. Think of it as an untested drug that some people think may have an effect on depression. The only thing they know is that it has no side effects. Except good ones. Gotta love that. So . . . don’t drop your meds or whatever your doctor has you doing. But talk to her or to him about exercise. And give it a shot.
We urge you not to start gradually. It is far better to make a sharp break with the past and a serious commitment to the future. If you’re not working or if you’re at or near retirement, we urge you as strongly as we can to make this your new job. Your single most important job. If you’re working like crazy—and the kids are still around and retirement is a ways off—think of it as your first priority after work and kids and do the best you can. But remember, as you get older, steady exercise rises on the priority list because the tide is rising, too. The tide has its priorities, and you must have yours. Or you’ll be swept away.
There is one thing people learn in their work lives that is enormously useful at this point. They learn to go to work. Without thinking much about it, they learn a skill that children and heiresses do not have. They learn to go to work and do their job. That simple knack is one of the most powerful organizing forces in life, and you have it, etched deep in your conscious and unconscious mind, no matter what kind of work you’ve done, or whether you’ve done it in an office or at home. Nice going. Now use it in your new life.
One of the terrific things about the go-to-work, honor-your-commitments habit is that it’s a great prioritizer. Work trumps everything except serious illness or family. Daily exercise should be treated the same way. If you’re going to have success with this excellent new life, you’re going to have to give regular exercise that priority. Which may be hard. Some people have trouble thinking that exercise is “serious.” They feel vaguely guilty about it, because it’s too much like play. Or self-indulgent. All we can say is, get over it, because that’s nuts. Nothing you are doing in the Next Third is as important as daily exercise. As important to you, to Old Fred, to the kids, to the ones who have to take care of you if things go south. If exercise feels like play, great; you’re one of the lucky ones. But it’s deadly serious, because it will keep you from becoming a pathetic, dependent old fool. You think there’s something more important than that? Get over it!
Harry and I are always asked, “Why six days? Why is that so important? What’s wrong with three days? Or two? Or one? Isn’t anything better than nothing?”
No, you silly twit! It’s not better than nothing! Or, in any case, it’s so much worse than six days for women over fifty that we don’t even want you to think about it. It will sap your strength and drain your resolve. It will put you on the beach. It’s six days because it has to be. Don’t argue. Please! Actually, it should be seven. The tide is seven, and it’s a boa constrictor. People think boa constrictors squeeze, but they don’t. They just wrap around you and wait. You let out a breath . . . they take up the slack. Do it again . . . they take up the slack again. Until you’re dead. The tide is like that. You relax . . . and it takes up the slack. So, no slacking. You’re lucky that only an hour a day works so well.
May I say that I have not reached my seventies without learning a thing or two about human frailty and its corollary, the pathetic excuse. There will be days when, armed with a pathetic excuse, you will insist that you are unable to exercise. Fine. That will happen. But do not conclude that it’s time to change Harry’s First Rule. It’s not. The rule stands. Try to get back in sync with it as soon as possible.
Do not try to get the rule in sync with you. That would be dumb.
Here’s another thing we hear all the time: “Yeah, but you guys are athletes. And this is nothing but another exercise craze. I’m no athlete. And I hate exercise. So this is not for me.”
Oh, yes it is. Neither Harry nor I amounted to much as athletes when we were kids. We’ve gotten into it, thank God, so it’s become fun, but that’s not the point. The point is that steady exercise is a coded message to your body—and your mind—telling you not to turn into a busted-down old crone. Serious exercise, six days a week, is not extreme; it’s the middle of the road. They just haven’t moved the road yet. That’s what we’re doing, together. We’re moving the road.
Early on, Harry said something that grabbed me: “In twenty years, failure to exercise six days a week will seem as self-destructive as smoking two packs of cigarettes a day.” Two packs a day was normal when I was a kid. They finally moved that road, and we’re going to move this one. You’re going to lead the way.
The best way to get into this new life is to take a deep breath, make a profound resolution and jump in, full tilt, for life. Do it as dramatically and with as much fanfare as you can muster. Get your husband on board. Tell everyone you know. Open a great bottle of wine. Whatever it takes. Because, let’s face it, this is not easy. It’s the most important thing you can do, but it’s not easy. So improve your chances by making the beginning as big, as joyful, as solemn as you can. Don’t decide to “try it for a few days.” That won’t work. Think about it hard for as long as you need and then jump in for the rest of your life. With ruffles and flourishes.
It’s interesting, since most men aren’t worrying about such things, but I think women wonder, “Well, what about Fred? Will Fred want to do this with me?” A reasonable question, and it is certainly true that this stuff is more fun (and more likely to succeed) if your spouse does it, too. So give him a shot at it.
But don’t wait for Fred! He wouldn’t have thought about waiting for you. And this is that great, come-and-get-it stage in your life when the focus ought to be sharply on what you want. You’ve been deeply trained to wonder and worry all the time about the kids, about the dog . . . about Old Fred. It’s deep in your bones now, if it wasn’t in your DNA from the beginning. But it is also true, as I mentioned, that for an awful lot of lucky women the grip of that instinct loosens some with menopause. Which, we respectfully submit, is absolutely wonderful. Invite Old Fred to save his life, too. Urge him to join you. But if he won’t get up out of the La-Z-Boy, the hell with him. You do it. On your own.
Here’s a nice story. I came home just three days before I went to work on this chapter, and there was this attractive woman of about fifty, working in a sleeveless T-shirt, painting the new bookshelves in the living room. I introduced myself, and she said, “Oh, you wrote that book! Your wife lent it to me last week, and I love it. I love the part about how you may have to age but you don’t have to rot.” She hit the word rot hard, as if she meant it. We got to talking, and she said, “I got separated eight months ago, because my husband’s decided to rot. And I’m not going to. I was up nights with that book. I’ve already lost forty pounds since we split up, and now I’m gonna keep on going.” She grinned as if it were Christmas. And showed me her triceps, proud as punch. She was emotionally big . . . she was in her fifties and she was getting big. I was nuts about her. In her case, it did not make sense to wait for Old Fred.
Okay, with or without Fred, you might think about a “Jump-Start Vacation”—a trip where exercise is the central activity. For example, take a week off, you and Fred—or a girlfriend if he won’t play. The “girls’ trip” is a great institution . . . increasingly important at this stage in your life. And a trip like this can be a wonderful annual event. Go on a bike tour in New England. Or Ohio. Or Europe, if you’ve got the dough. If you’ve really let yourself go to hell in recent years, you’ll have to work out some just to be able to take such a trip. But no matter where you are on the fitness scale, you can probably find a trip that will be right for you.
As you will have begun to sense, one of our little agenda items here is to urge women to accelerate what we think is a natural tendency toward much greater strength and independence in the Next Third. A trip like this—with the girls or not—can be a significant step down that sunny and pleasant road. You’ll love it. It will be great for your body. And your mind. And your spirit. Not bad.
And don’t think you have to spend a lot of money. You can bike somewhere near home. Or you can rent or borrow a cottage on a lake or the ocean and get a pair of sea kayaks (don’t do that one alone) . . . do that every day for four hours or so, and you’ll really get a nice jump. Or hike in the Rockies or the Appalachians. Or go to one of the hundreds of cross-country ski houses in the east or out west; they’re pretty reasonable and there is no better exercise or fun on earth. Or go to a spa . . . or a “boot camp.” Ladies’ week at a spa is a familiar and wonderful thing. The magazines are full of ads for these places. But don’t go to one where the emphasis is all herbal wraps, manicures and touchy-feely talk. There are lots of men and women who want to con you into thinking you can save your immortal soul and your body by humming some mantra or popping a supplement. That’s nonsense. Saving souls—and bodies—is hard work. Worthwhile work but hard. Just do it and don’t give way to feel-good horseshit. For example, find a spa with serious workouts and diets. Sniff around and find a good one. Then go. And work at it. We’re saving souls here.
A downhill skiing trip counts, too. There’s a gutsy, brave thing that will work wonders. I have a lot of women pals who now do women’s ski trips routinely and thrive on them. With the girls or with Fred or alone, go out west or up to New England and ski for a week. Or two weeks, if you can. A month, if you can afford it. That’s what I did when I turned forty, a thousand years ago. Took a whole month off from a frantic law practice and learned to ski, almost from scratch, at an age when most people are quitting. A little extreme, but it gave me one of my core pleasures, especially in retirement.
Incidentally, there’s a lot of talk about skiing in this book, just because Harry and I both happen to do it. Don’t be put off if you don’t ski; most people don’t. It’s just a metaphor for vigorous sport. Anyhow, skiing counts, and you can learn it in a few weeks, whether you’re forty or sixty. (You can learn cross-country in a day.) Try it. It’ll be fun, and it will put your feet on a path you can travel with delight for the rest of your life.
One last thought about jump-start trips. These are the prelims, not the main event. The main event is the rest of your life. Take this book along. You and Fred, if you can get him into it, can read to each other back in that cozy room at night. And swap ideas about what you’re going to do when you get home. Plan. Scheme. Write stuff down. Start a notebook. Figure out which one of you is the planner and which the inspirer . . . divide up the tasks.
But get ready for what you’re going to do when you get home. That’s the point.
If it turns out you don’t have the money to take a jump-start trip anytime soon, forget about it. Just begin. It’s too important to let it slide, and it would be pathetic to use the jump-start thing as an excuse. Worse than letting Fred sideline you.
I came across a marvelous book in the funky 1890s camp where I worked a lot on this project, on a tiny island in Lake Winnipesaukee up in New Hampshire. Written in 1905, it’s a Danish exercise book that was purchased by one of my grandfathers—an English professor by trade, but a bit of an exercise buff by inclination. It’s terrific stuff, heavy on Indian clubs, photos of the mustachioed Dane in his undies, elaborate advice about the tremendous importance of baths. For some reason, the author was adamant about baths. Toward the end, he makes this excellent point: “Whether you are weak or strong, young or old, I advise you to begin with these exercises at once and rather today than tomorrow. . . . Do not delay because you do not happen to have a bath; you can buy one when convenient, and in the meantime be content to rub yourself all over with a wet towel.”
So don’t fool around just because you don’t have the time or dough for a fancy bike trip. Just rub yourself all over with a wet towel and get going.
A lot of people fight me on this one, but you have to join a gym. Though women seem to be more open to it than men, thank God, a lot of ’em hate the idea, too. Get over it. It doesn’t have to be fancy—the Y is fine—but there’s a structure to having a gym that nothing else provides. If you think outdoor exercise is ten times as pleasant and healthy as indoor exercise, fine. Join a gym anyway. You need it for rainy days. For winter. For the group classes and the weight machines. And to find the brute who’s going to show you how to do weight training. You need a place to go, every day. You may do non-gym things a lot of days . . . bike, run or ski. But there will be days when, no matter what, you will just have to drag your butt out of bed and go to the gym.
One of the great things about the gym is that you do stuff with other people. Women, for the most part, have a natural taste for that. Which is perhaps why more women than men join them. Whatever, but the instinct is sound. It’s good to do this stuff in packs. You’re more apt to keep it up, more likely to go for it, more likely to succeed. That’s what working in packs has been all about since the dawn of history: it’s more fun and it works better.
If you live in a small town with one gym, go there. But if you live in New York or Chicago or L.A., with a gym every few blocks, consider your choice carefully. First consideration? Probably money. Some of these places can cost an absolute fortune; if you don’t have it, don’t spend it. The simple places almost always have everything you need. Which is to say, a few aerobics machines and some weights, whether stationary or free, and an adequate, clean space in which to use them.
But remember, this is a priority in your life now. Bear that in mind when you decide what you can afford. Don’t pick someplace nasty just because it’s cheap and then quit because you don’t want to walk on the locker room floor. That is false economy. Proximity counts for a lot, too. Getting there is more than half the battle. But it isn’t the only thing. These places have their own peculiar ethos, their own atmosphere, just like companies or colleges, and it’s important to find one that feels right. There’s a beautiful gym almost on our block in New York, but for some reason it draws a petulant and depressed crowd. Better to walk a few blocks and go someplace fun. My general preference is for a place where there’s a mix of ages and interests, with a slight emphasis on younger and cute. That’s just me. You decide.
Hilary and I joined a place a while ago where everyone else is in his twenties or thirties. The facilities are remarkable, but let me tell you, even though I’m in decent shape these days, I still felt odd for a while, down in the locker room with all those young hard-bodies. There’s an edginess among young athletes that isn’t relaxing if you’re deep into your middle years. I’ve gotten over it, but I still think the ideal gym for women and men in their fifties and sixties is a place with a decent number of young people and some people one’s own age. Not so easy for me, because I’m so incredibly old. I hope this book will draw out gangs of people; I need the company.
But if you look so horrible that you can’t bear to go to a place with lots of kids and gym rats . . . that’s no excuse! There are plenty of places that cater to older people, and even more that do one-on-one training, if you have that kind of dough. Me, I’d get over it and go to a regular gym, but tastes vary. The big thing is to go.
We’ll talk more about trainers in a later chapter, but get a trainer, too. Find one whom you like but who’s a real motivator. My friend Tina says that’s the key. She and her husband found a woman in Colorado who’s a former triathlete: “tough, no-nonsense and fun. I want to work hard for her and I like her praise. Every woman should have one in her life . . . a friend, a trainer, anyone who makes you want to work at it.” As Tina points out, too many of her pals slack off after menopause or retirement, as if they should take it easy on themselves now that they’re frail or something. Which is precisely what not to do. Don’t just “do the treadmill” for fifteen minutes or take a walk and call it exercise. Go for it, for God’s sake. That’s what works. And don’t kid yourself, please.
But if you’re in the early stages, don’t think you have to go nuts or not at all. You have to start somewhere. Maybe you’d like a women-only place. My youngest sister, Petie, who’s eighty, beautiful and about as much fun as anyone you’ve ever met, swears by a place like that.
Even more important than the age mix or sex mix at a gym is its spirit. Try to figure out if the trainers and staff are cordial to one another . . . say hello and stuff like that. The place should feel good. It’s bad enough to have to go at all; it’s impossible if the people aren’t pleasant. Of course, you also want a place that has the right activities. Spinning, yoga, swimming, or whatever gets you going.
So shop carefully, if you have a choice. And remember, a lot of these places will insist on your signing up for a number of potentially expensive months, so read the fine print. Special point for retired folk: If you’re going to be away for months at a time, be sure to check the gym’s policies for suspending your membership. There are some ripoffs in this area. Last thing: Be sure the joint is clean and the towels are decent. Gotta have good towels.
Classes or group activities are great motivators. My own favorite, which I don’t recommend for everyone, is spinning class. This is a group of crazies on stationary bikes who race to loud music and manic exhortations from a class leader. Lots of women love it, oddly enough. Not for you? What about step class or aerobic dance? Take your pick. One of the best, especially for women, is yoga class. There’s something about it that speaks to women more than to most men. But it’s superb exercise if you don’t get tangled up with some young yoga nazi who is clueless about being over forty and may cause you injury. But good, temperate yoga is great. Give it a shot. Some of the most beautiful bodies you’ll ever see—men or women, young or old—are the ones you’ll see in yoga class. This stuff obviously works. Pilates is good, too. Some of our closest (and fittest) pals are Pilates nuts.
Whether yoga, Pilates or something else, try some kind of class or group activity. First, you’re more likely to go because there’s a set time for class and that creates a certain discipline. Second, you’re far less likely to dog it once you get there. (It’s way too easy to dog it when you’re alone.) So look around. What you want eventually, it seems to me, is a solid exercise habit, supported by a structured class, at a pleasant gym or yoga studio.
One of the luxuries of my life and not having a regular job is that I can do this stuff whenever I like. But you know what? Whether you’re working or not, it’s a lot easier to exercise if you have a regular time. A time when you change your duds and head off to the gym. Or the track. Or the water. Same time every day, so there’s not a new decision every time. For me, early in the morning is best. I can’t sleep anyway, because I’m an old person. At six o’clock, I get out of bed and go straight off to class. Try it.
Harry can work out at the end of the day but not early in the morning. But give him credit—in a very busy life he is pretty regular. Noontime works for some. Instead of that big, fat lunch. But no matter what, pick a time. The only real trick is to have a schedule and a habit. No one has the character to make the fresh decision every day to go to the gym. Go on “automatic” or you’ll quit.
If you’re lucky enough to have an athletic passion (most people don’t), by all means tap into it as a support for your exercise program. If it’s an aerobic sport, you can make it your core activity. Running, cross-country, swimming . . . just do it. But even if it’s not an aerobic sport, you can build your routine around it to give it focus and make it more fun. Don’t miss a single chance to make this fun and close to what you enjoy.
Personally, I have the great good luck to enjoy a number of sports these days (ironic, when you think what a mess of an athlete I was as a kid). I love to ski, bike, sail, row, wind-surf and God knows what. When I sit on the hateful quadriceps machine, in pain, pushing that stack of weights up the ramp, I think of skiing the bumps at Aspen or the steep pitches at Stowe. Sure, this is hell, but the payoff will be on those magic hills. And it will be worth anything. Pleasantly enough, a serious program of aerobics and weight training will absolutely revolutionize your ability to do other sports. The thought of that can keep you going.
Same with the biking. I sit in that darkened room full of spinning men and women, blazing with teenage music that makes my head hurt, pumping my heart out. And in my mind’s eye I am biking along a pine-scented road, between stone walls up at the lake in northern New Hampshire, getting ready to climb a mighty hill. It doubles my pleasure. It keeps me going. Tap into your passion, if you have one. It helps.
So, you’re asking, how serious is this serious exercise? Suffice it to say for now that you have to exercise hard enough, after the first days, to take up the slack. You will want to sweat. You will want to strain. You will want to feel your body getting traction. Not a casual walk . . . not a round of golf . . . not an hour in the garden. Don’t worry about the details for now. Just know that you have to put a strain on the lines of your life so that your anchor will hold in that tide we talked about.
Some of the people Harry and I like best hate exercise. People who live a life of the mind. Bookish folk . . . lunatic professionals . . . artists . . . teachers . . . gardeners. People like my sisters who love to eat and drink and talk. And who read in the privacy of their very own homes. They hate sports, hate exercise, hated school because of sports and exercise. And hate people like us who try to tell them how great it all is. They are never going to change.
Well, yes they are, if they can hear a couple of things. Like: There is no “life of the mind.” Mind and body really are one, just as the dear old Romans said. A sound mind in a healthy body or however the old wheeze goes.
Besides which, from a Darwinian perspective, you most assuredly are an athlete. Never mind that you were a skinny little thing (or not!) in junior high school. Never mind that your hand-eye coordination was a painful joke and that you’d rather read or shop than almost anything. You were still designed to hunt. In packs. You ignore that basic fact at your peril. You may not like exercise, but do it anyway. For your heart, for your mind, for your immortal soul. And for the rest of us. We want your company.