I was originally going to write this blog with the most boring of all possible titles: “On Exercise.” I was going to do so merely as a literary exercise, of course, which would cause such a literary exercise to be a true exercise. This would be so because any time you want to make a topic sound boring, you simply have to put an “on” in front of it. So, instead of writing a blog entitled “How to Make Cookies,” call the blog “On Cookies” and no one will read it. But if you put “how to…” in front in it, a lot of people will read it. Add the words “world’s best” to the title, right before cookies, of course, and you’ll have an enormous readership: “How to Make the World’s Best Cookies.” Yes, that would do it.
But if you want to create a writing exercise, you don’t do that. Rather, you choose to add “on” to the word (like Theophrastus’ famous treatise “On Sweats”) and see if, even though you’ve deliberately entitled the work with the most boring title possible, you still can procure readership. But how can you do that?
Honestly I don’t think you can. So better to add something like “world’s best.” But even that might not do it, for exercise is seen by many a person as a kind of boring enterprise; that must be true or more people would do it voluntarily. But if you add the word “naked,” you will definitely garner many more readers. That is true of nearly any title. You could write “How to Bake the World’s Best Cookies Naked” and then you would have a title that would definitely turn heads. Naked is, after all, one of those words that you don’t just read right past. So, let’s consider exercising naked, if only for the sake of this literary exercise.
The Greeks exercised naked, as did the Romans. Yes, you could go to a Roman bath house, for example, and expect to see your fellow townsmen on the central mall (called a palaestra) working up a sweat completely naked. But that was not alarming to you, as you were used to seeing them in the stall-less bathrooms dropping the weight of their bowels right next to you.
Yes, you might even sit next to someone of the opposite sex and chat with him or her about business while you were doing your own business, and quite publically at that. So I think it is safe to say that “naked” can be in a blog about exercise and be far from controversial but still, perhaps garner your attention.
Yet that is not what you might have had in mind if you had begun to read a blog entitled “On Exercise.” Instead, admittedly I have succumbed to the temptation to give it a catchier title, and thus I hope not to disappoint, for I do want to speak about the true importance of exercise. Indeed, it is vital to exercise and I think to do so somewhat vigorously, if your body will allow you to. Doctors say so, and so do many well-written and well-researched websites. But I will speak here chiefly from personal experience, not scientifically or with a view to convincing you to subscribe to some new diet and exercise program. Rather, let me just say that I have had basically three phases in my life, and I have done much better physically and emotionally in two of them than I did in the one that was devoid of exercise.
In that lazy phase, in the years I was in graduate school and just out of it, I did not find time to exercise regularly, doing so intermittently at best. And thus I found myself in those years less healthy, often more irritable (some of which admittedly could have been caused by being in graduate school), and generally just less happy than when I took it upon myself to exercise vigorously and regularly. In my youth I had been quite athletic, and after the aforementioned hiatus I became athletic again. When I reintroduced regular exercise into my life, my health improved. My heart rate decreased markedly. My blood pressure dropped. By the grace of God (and thanks to exercise), I don’t have to take any medications even though I am in my 50s.
And, on the topic of exercise, you might wonder what exactly that “World’s Best Exercise Program” is. Let me say first that one size does not fit all, and really all I propose to do here is tell you what I do, not what is the “world’s best” program is which, truth be told, I do not do naked (of course):
I take a good morning walk (about a mile) with my wife and our over-sized dog. Then, I bike to my office (about 6 miles) where I mainly write. At some point during the day, I either swing a Kettlebell (about once a week for about 30 minutes, following along with a kind of kitsch work out video) or I go for pretty swift jog (about three times a week); I also lift weights (about three times a week). And I swim continually for an hour and 15 minutes about once a week. Once in a while I combine these for say a short swim and a short run, but mostly I do them on separate days. Except for the Kettlebell (shorter) or swimming (longer), I do them for about fifty minutes or so each day. And then I bike six miles home.
You certainly don’t have to do what I do; I’m just letting you know what I do, and, more importantly, recommending exercise in general.
No, you don’t have to exercise naked to make exercise interesting. It would be difficult and illegal to bike naked; that much is certain. I suppose you could exercise naked, if you wanted to, in the privacy of your own home. But honestly, that might be weird and I just put naked in this blog to get you to read it, for after all, “On Exercise” would have been a pretty boring title, one that most certainly needed a little dressing up.
When I was a student at Dickinson College in Pennsylvania, I had a course entitled “Approaches to History.” In it, we considered various ways of writing and reconstructing history. It reflected the first beginnings of what is now commonly referred to as revisionist history, which means history interpreted through the lens of a particular sociological or political agenda. It sounds innocent enough, and at some level it is innocent. On the positive side, such an understanding of history means that we can’t just take for granted what we have inherited in a history book that purports to be unbiased. To enlarge on that, it means that there is no “unbiased” history. Everyone, wittingly or not, has a point of view that is influenced by his or her surroundings, his or her values or lack thereof, and when one interprets or reconstructs or writes history it will be, inevitably, interpreted or written through the aforementioned lens.
Take Christianity, for example. The Christian scriptures were written, presumably, by Christians who no doubt would have had a bias as to how to interpret the history of Christmas and Easter. The minor miracles surrounding Christmas are less spectacular than that of Easter, so I leave those aside. But Easter: now there’s a dilemma. If the Christians are the ones in charge of relating the history of the empty tomb, couldn’t they be revising their interpretation of the events to suit their own political agenda? In the gospels (and non-canonical concomitant Christian literature), the early Christians all claimed that the tomb was empty. A modern historian, operating from the assumption that miracles don’t “really” happen, could revise that account: “Well, the Christians were obviously biased and were unable to see clearly what happened, so they pretended he was raised from the dead. Or maybe they even hid the body and lied about the resurrection.” And thus this historian has revised the history to what is “more likely” or at least more logical. But the lens of that historian has its own bias: it is based on the notion of miracles not happening.
But what if those miracles did happen? If one were to entertain that possibility for even a moment, one would have to go back and reconsider, yet again, the big miracle of Easter and, yes, even the minor miracles surrounding Christmas. And one would have to look at one’s own life and recognize those times when something happened that seemed miraculous. And so forth. That process may just lead that person upwards out of despair and directly to the wider, redemptive implication of Easter, the foot of the cross. But that is the material of another blog.
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When Elaine Jakes was in her thirties—those days were as vividly vibrant with the colors of the late 1960s/early 1970s as Elaine was vibrantly vivacious—she twice took a summer vacation with Sheila and me to Canada. Sheila, if peradventure you’ve read the Curious Autobiography, you’ll recall was my mother’s closest friend in those days. They lived together and jointly raised me when I was but a lad, as difficult as such a proposition may then have been when a nontraditional family structure was viewed with great suspicion. “There’s no man in the house,” some could be heard muttering. “How will that boy turn out to be a man?” I will, however, set their complaints about the lack of a male role model aside, as there were, in any case, a number of men who served as positive role models, prominent among whom was my grandfather, Harry Reed Jakes.
Yet there was something more than mere majesty. There was a lesson in beholding those great ships stuck in those narrow locks. It was the lesson of patience and grace under fire. More often than not we find ourselves stuck between things. We’re hoping for something, looking forward to it, as we wait for our figurative lock to fill up, as if whatever it is that we are seeking could alone bring us happiness. Now sometimes, of course, there is a modicum of happiness attached to that new thing, that new phase of life, as it must have been happier for the sailors to be on the open sea (or at least open lake) than carefully maneuvering the slender confines of the lock system. But even in the narrow maneuvering, there may well have been for them some fulfillment qua sailing, for it was chiefly in the locks, no doubt, that they had the chance to prove what good sailors they actually were. They waited patiently between locks and gracefully discharged their duties of steering the ships carefully between those narrow ducts. And to some extent, I imagine, they were the happier for it, for they were doing what they were called in this life to do. And even here, I fancy, you could say I had male role models, for all the sailors I saw were men, if role models only at the great distance between the motel balcony and the ship’s prow.