No B.S Friday: Stay vital, stay young. Be dead later.
Ever feel like the idea of a nice long sleep in a silk-lined coffin is actually a pretty attractive idea.
Modern life is hectic and exhausting.
At lot of being dead would suck, but it at least you could be guaranteed a good 8 hours rest… at least.
I’ve been there. And it’s a tough place to be.
I’ve always played a lot of sport and I owe sport a lot – it has given me a sense of what it feels like to be alive – what it feels like to have vital life-force pumping through my veins.
But I remember waking up one day and feeling like I was teethered to a corpse. My body felt cold and alien. It was almost like rigor mortis had started to set in. I wasn’t moving well and when I listened to my body, the only impulse I could hear was the impulse to lie down and be still.
It was in between soccer seasons and I was putting in a lot of hours at the office, on the computer doing long stretches, sometimes like eight hours without break. I was eating at my desk and not seeing a lot of sun.
I wasn’t sleeping well either. I was getting a lot of screen time just before bed and this was all before we learnt about how blue screens mess with our sleep patterns.
I definitely wasn’t treating my body like temple. I wasn’t even treating it like an amusement park.
I was just treating it like some kind of industrial commercial precinct. My mind was on a mission. I had things to do. My body’s only job was to move my mind between the various devices I was using to get stuff done.
But you can only do this so long.
And soon enough, my body started dying. It started slowing down. It started to grow cold and stiff.
At first I didn’t really notice. I had replaced my morning run with a coffee, and when my tolerance was low that was able to give me a kickstart in the morning. But eventually you build a tolerance for coffee.
I was also spending a lot of time on the phone engaging my social mind and the project itself was very exciting. This kept me going. But as the project started to get bogged down, I realised that my body had grown lazy. It didn’t want to do anything any more. Where there used to be an impulse to run and to move and to kick balls around a field, there was now nothing. If there was an impulse at all it was an impulse to avoid as much physical activity as possible.
Maybe today I’ll take the escalator.
To be honest it was kind of horrifying. I suddenly felt old. I was embarrassed by the sluggishness that had taken me over. And the feeling that I was dragging around a corpse from one place to another was actually repulsive. Like truly disgusting.
In the end, I was lucky. My background in sport meant that I knew that having a body wasn’t meant to feel this way. I could see that something was wrong. But how many bodies do we lose to the grind of office life, family life and escalator culture?
How many people become an undertaker to their own body and never realise that there could be an alternative?
And I was lucky because I had the financial resources to course-correct. I could hire a personal trainer. I could take-time off work to hit the gym.
I had the money to do the simple things and do the simple things well.
And that’s the torture of modern life. We know what we need. Move and move often. Eat well and eat light. Go easy on the sugar, caffeine and alcohol.
But it’s still so hard to find the time and space to do that.
And if you’re struggling to find the motivation to get your money story sorted, maybe you can add this to the list.
Wealth gives you the ability to do the things you know you need to do, and to live life with as much vitality as possible.
There’ll be time enough for snoozing in a coffin later.
JG.