Stop Exercising and Start Moving

Yes, there is a difference.

Photo by Ivy Son from Pexels

I like to think of exercise as a very small box the fitness and wellness industry convince us we need to cram ourselves into. On paper exercise is an activity requiring physical effort, carried out to sustain or improve health and fitness but in practice exercise might as well be defined as a rigid set of activities, carried out in a specific way to achieve an arbitrary, yet pervasive idea of health and fitness. In this way, the fitness and wellness industry has co-opted our self esteem for profit and we are buying it because that idea of health and fitness is really an idea about who is deserving of happiness, fulfillment and love.

And I think it is safe to say we all want happiness, fulfillment and love; yet the idea of exercise makes these constructs obtainable only to a specific type of person and a specific set of actions. This limits us to a specific way of being, keeping us in a cycle of picking ourselves apart and whittling ourselves away. We must work to fit into that very small box and one day that happiness will be ours.

Happiness is not found, though. It is created and cultivated. The box will always be too small. Always. So, instead, we must get rid of the box. To do this, we need to redefine exercise to something expansive, connected, fulfilling, nurturing, and joy filled. Something without the…