Purpose

Thanksgiving is behind us and the end of the year celebrations only a few weeks away. This is a time of universal indulgences, where few of us will prioritize our health over a temporary pleasure. Rather than psychologically berate ourselves for this I feel it would be better to spend that energy querying how we can best re-attune ourselves after we have had our fill of seasonal excess.

What is our purpose? What skills are we striving to master? Where do we wish to excel? These are big questions with no right or wrong answer to them. There will be consequences in how we answer them though. Whatever we deem our purpose will influence how we organize our lives. We will engage in conscious and unconscious patterns to manifest whatever we decided our purpose should be.

However, we choose to answer this juggernaut of a question, will have a physical aspect to it. Our physical condition will be a deciding factor in how much of our purpose we will able to achieve. Whatever it is we want to accomplish will be more attainable by being in better health. Our diet and exercise practices, our stress management techniques, and, stamina, and so on will be heavy determinants in how far we go down our imagined rabbit holes.

I ask the question of our purpose now because in a month many of us join a gym, or begin some exercise routine of some kind. After all the extraversion of the holiday, we will ritualistically turn inwards. We will innately crave to be in better condition regardless of the condition we are in. Before we do that though we should ask ourselves what is the purpose of our conditioning. Do we need more strength flexibility, endurance, or some combination of these? Is there a neglected aspect of our health that needs attending to, or would we be better served by fine-tuning what we have already developed? What are we preparing for should inform how we prepare.

Asking what our purpose is, is a modern question. Most people throughout history had physical demands that were such a part of life that to not meet them would risk death. Their purpose was to survive whatever circumstances they were in. In our post agriculture, post-industrialization, post information ers any of us can survive and often prosper while performing at a fraction of our innate physical potential. We have the luxury of not having to have much physical stress on our bodies. While it's pleasant to not be on the cutting edge of evolution it does create a disconnect. There is now a separation between our physical capacity and our psychological ambitions. Without having environmental stressors teaching us exactly how we need to be strong, it becomes increasingly difficult to find strength of any kind.

So once again I ask what is our purpose. Now that many of us are a month away from some health-centric resolution what are we trying to achieve? How can whatever fitness routine we import in our lives bring about the specific benefits we need to best reach our goals. What are we finding strength for and how best can we find it?

Let's spend some time thinking about all this in the final month of the decade. Let's think about what brings our life joy, pleasure and meaning. What do we need to do to develop the strength to do those things, whatever they are, with more ease, so we do them with more frequency.

Anthony Bruni