“I am working out,”

I just make it look easy. But I don’t just make it “look” easy, I make it easy -- and therefore, anybody can do it, and get instant, verifiable, self-evident results.

That’s getting to be true with many things one does now -- achieve instant gratification (verification) of the wisdom of what one is doing -- rather than having to wait a long time for any payback -- including even having to wait until the afterlife until one is rewarded. But by then, anything is possible -- and of course, all bets are off.

So to see instant cause and effect -- rather than just slaving away believing -- until after one dies and then is rewarded, is still a hard-held notion to many. It should not be so in the world of conditioning for athletics -- or any other purpose anymore.

Fifty years ago, prior to the time exercise made a claim to being “scientific,” it was well known for many kooky ideas and beliefs. The best of the bunch, were those whose sole objective was to produce “instant results” and transformations, which were those who targeted specifically, how one should hold one’s posture, walk, sit, "behave," and otherwise give an impression of being a confident and competent person.

That’s still true today -- as body language and the expressions of movement. The lone exception has been this notion of exercising just for fitness’ sake -- without any mastery in movement. In fact, the ideal is to create as much work as possible, sweat as profusely a possible, experience as much pain, discomfort and difficulty as possible -- for its own sake, because none of those skills could ever be useful directly in any normal, useful human activity.

Much of what we learned to do in the 20th century, followed that familiar pattern of creating work (struggle) for its own sake -- because of the unprecedented challenge in creating meaningful leisure time and activities -- to replace the purposeful and absolutely necessary work that was now beginning to become obsolete because of modern knowledge and technology .

It still is the great challenge of modern life -- creating meaning and purpose -- especially for the increasingly and accelerating many who will find themselves freed from the prescribed tasks that kept them obsesively-compulsively “busy,” before their “retirement.”

Many fail that challenge at that point in their lives -- because they’ve never known anything else but the drudgery of a treadmill existence -- doing whatever their “supervisors” told them they had better do. So to be thrust into freedom at that point in their lives with no instruction in how to direct and shape one’s own life, causes many to flounder and disintegrate in that freedom and demand enslavement once again -- as the familiar confines and justifications for their existence.

Because this extended life was seldom possible before for so many, there hasn’t been an overwhelming good example of what it can be -- without the deterioration we’ve called the normal “aging” process. By that we usually mean, that everything bad that can happen, happens, and there’s nothing one can do about it.