And therein lies the problem: Choosing to move in ways that feel punishing so you can burn the most calories is very strategic if you have a short-term goal. But if your goal is to maintain physical activity over a lifetime and reap the multitude of benefits it brings, try to refocus and start choosing to move in ways that feel good to you. That’s because the best determinant of sustainability is not how much weight you hope to lose but how participating in physical activities makes you feel in the moment.
–from No Sweat: How the Simple Science of Motivation Can Bring You a Lifetime of Fitness by Michelle Segar

The last time I took a formal dance class was over twenty years ago. I showed up with a feeling of excitement. Even the fact that I was the only one dressed in pink (the other modern dance students were clad in black leotards) didn’t phase me. It was only afterwards when the instructor took me aside to hand me a photocopied diet that I realized my foolish blunder.

I’ve always loved to dance. My mother was a serious athlete who pounded the pavement for miles and miles throughout my childhood. She would train seriously on the weekends. Then she became an accomplished equestrian when she hit her forties. My father, on the other hand, hardly exercised at all. However, on the weekends he would buy what he would call “running donuts” in my mother’s honor. (Of course, the two of us partners in crime would enjoy the donuts without including any running.)

I played on the basketball team in junior high, then ran on the track team for two years in high school. These weren’t fun activities, but I liked the group spirit.

So as a middle-aged adult, I feel I should make a statement and “go for it” and train for some monumental competition. But I’ve found that I really only enjoy movement accompanied by music, in the form of long walks with my headphones or Zumba classes.

So this year, I am going to sign up for tango lessons. I’ve found a local school. All I have to do is show up. However, this time I promise not to wear pink.

I expect that this winter I’ll run another marathon somewhere in the world. And I’m sure come next summer I’ll be out in another triathlon somewhere, giving it my best shot. Thus the seasons come and go, and the years pass by. I’ll age one more year, and probably finish another novel. One by one, I’ll face the tasks before me and complete them as best I can. Focusing on each stride forward, but at the same time taking a long-range view, scanning the scenery as far ahead as I can. I am, after all, a long-distance runner.

My time, the rank I attain, my outward appearance–all of these are secondary. For a runner like me, what’s really important is reaching the goal I set myself, under my own power. I give it everything I have, endure what needs enduring, and am able, in my own way, to be satisfied. From the failures and joys I always try to come away having grasped a concrete lesson. (It’s got to be concrete, no matter how small it is.) And I hope that, over time, as one race follows another, in the end I’ll reach a place I’m content with. Or maybe just catch a glimpse of it. (Yes, that’s a more appropriate way of putting it.)

–from What I Talk About When I Talk About Running by Haruki Murakami

Focus and perseverance. According to Murakami, these are two winning qualities in both a writer and a runner. I could go on about how exercise is important for one’s creativity. (Why, think about the Romantic poets hotfooting it around the Lake District.) As a friend said to me on my first hike in New Mexico, once you start walking, everything petty falls away. The brain needs this reset.

Murakami has written a solid memoir yet in the end his quest seems ephemeral. The book deals with training regimens and the anticipatory joy of running each marathon, along with the inevitable muscle cramps and disappointments. Why does he do it? He seems to get a lot of satisfaction out of testing himself. He’s not particularly interested in the outward trappings of success. And isn’t this a sign of greatness? He gets his marching orders from within.

The book is tinged with sadness–the familiar sense that much time has passed under the bridge, that things will never be as they were. Like a naked tree in winter, he shivers and mourns the loss of his leaves. This is a book about searching, much less about finding. But there is a gentleness to it that almost resembles pleasure. The long-distance runner never exactly arrives. But he keeps on keeping on, the best thing to do in any case.

I have a friend who went to India a while ago, and the day before he was going to fly we had a phone conversation. It turned out he was going with another friend who had made all of the travel arrangements, and this person hadn’t realized that for just a little more money they could have flown business class instead of economy class, which of course on such a long flight would have been far more comfortable. We were speaking about whether they could manage to change their tickets, if there would be a penalty, and how much nicer it would be to go business class. If they could arrange for the upgrade, they reasoned, they would arrive rested instead of exhausted and unhappy. Right in the middle of this conversation about moving into business class, my friend said, “I wonder how much it would cost to go first class?”

I know that state of mind so well. As soon as you get into business class, you start thinking about first class. This is how we are conditioned–there is always something else to want, even before we take a moment to appreciate what we already have, or are about to have.

…An essential question we might ask ourselves is, “What do I really need right now, in this moment, to be happy?” The world offers us many answers to that question: You need a new car and a new house and a new relationship and…But do we really?

–from “The Kindness Handbook” by Sharon Salzberg

It’s funny, but when I think of what I need to be happy right now, the list isn’t a mammoth one: good music, good company, good food, something engaging to read, exercise…and the vaporization of Donald J. Trump.

I watch a lot of cable news and there is this commercial that keeps coming on about a family getting reading for Christmas. The mother and children are in on a holiday surprise for dad and they keep exchanging knowing smiles. The doorbell rings. And it’s the Ace Hardware man delivering a grill for dad!! The father looks at the giant grill wrapped in a red ribbon and he is overwhelmed with joy.

I don’t know any men who would get that worked up over a grill. But I guess I avoid the barbecues where I would meet such men. My point? It’s hard to imagine feeling a sense of completion when it comes to receiving a big fancy gift. Or a major upgrade in status. Or anything that is supposed to really make you happy: moving to a new place, getting married, experiencing phenomenal success and swimming in money. These are all great things, but they’re not prerequisites for happiness.

That family in the advertisement could have had a leaky roof, a charred meal, no sense of where the next paycheck would come from. But they might have been happy anyway. Who knows? I’m not glorifying poverty, just suggesting that happiness can be entirely independent of the stuff we think we need to get there.

It is not all books that are as dull as their readers. There are probably words addressed to our condition exactly, which, if we could really hear and understand, would be more salutary than the morning or the spring to our lives, and possibly put a new aspect on the face of things for us. How many a man has dated a new era in his life from the reading of a book!
–From “Walden” by Henry David Thoreau

In rereading Walden for the first time in twenty years, I see how much he was rebelling against social conditioning and mental sludge. His vow to live deliberately had more to it than simplifying his lodgings and his diet. “The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation,” he writes. We are trapped by an enormous amount of peer pressure and willful make-believe.

“It is never too late to give up our prejudices,” he writes. “No way of thinking or doing, however ancient, can be trusted without proof.”

He tells us to read the classics in their original languages (“I think that having learned our letters we should read the best that is in literature.”), to beware of technology (“But lo! men have become the tools of their tools.”), to value our private opinion of ourselves more than any public opinion (“What a man thinks of himself, that it is which determines, or rather indicates, his fate.”) and to stop checking the news (“Hardly a man takes a half-hour’s nap after dinner, but when he wakes he holds up his head and asks, ‘What’s the news?’ as if the rest of mankind had stood his sentinels.”)

The practice of eating animals is another example of how we are blindsided by what is accepted as normal behavior: “I have no doubt that it is part of the destiny of the human race, in its gradual improvement, to leave off eating animals, as surely as the savage tribes have left off eating each other when they came in contact with the more civilized.”

I think Thoreau’s main enemy is the deeply human need to be approved of by others. We do things because everyone else does. We think things aren’t possible for us because we see ourselves through the lens of those maintaining the status quo. We are pack animals desperate for “likes” on Facebook. We are terrified of rejection. In rereading Walden, I see that Thoreau’s act of boiling everything down to its essence is an act of rebellion against social rules and regulations.

He moved into that tiny cabin in 1845 as a way of separating himself from the multitudes and trusting that voice inside his head. I’m sure his closest neighbors thought he was a madman.