Being Young and Being Healthy, Are Two Different Things
The young are not necessarily healthy, but the healthy can be so at any age. Age does not imply illness, disability and malfunctioning. However, what the young and the old do and can do, are two totally different manifestations of human possibility.
The adults of any species, don't do what the young of that species do -- because what is appropriate and intelligent behavior and functioning, depends on their understanding capacities. In the young, they are trying to discover what those capacities are, whereas in an adult, one should have a fairly good idea of what their capabilities are, and so just making the same mistakes they did when they were just starting out on the lifelong journey of discovery and actualization, would not be considered understandable behavior -- but ignoring and denying the realities one has experienced as the actualities of their existence.
Not everyone is destined and designed to be the leader of the pack, but for everyone to think so, would be so disruptive as to quickly lead that community into extinction. In a well-functioning society, people have to eventually realize what roles and functions they better serve -- and not everyone demand to be the quarterback, lead singer, chief executive officer.
In similar fashion, everyone serves society best when they recognize the skills and liabilities they bring to the community -- at the appropriate time. It would behoove every society for the fully mature, to simply act as newborns -- thinking that is how they actualize their potential. That potential emerges and evolves with the exercise of them -- and so an essential quality and component of every exercise worth doing, is that it evolves into a higher and deeper understanding of what they are doing and their ultimate limits at it -- and not simply repeating every movement as though an unimproving machine.
That is the different between machines and living, growing organisms: one improves while the other can only deteriorate. So the concept that is important, is whether one is improving, or getting worse -- and knowing the difference. Obviously, those who think they can only remain the same, have no understanding in the value of life. They have eliminated every possibility of improvement and evolution -- to regard themselves as unvarying machines, who will only know deterioration and decline.
Many people don't recognize that there is always this change, and changing -- as the essential quality and difference of life, until it is too late, and they realized they have changed but they did not ensure that they would do so in an advantageous and beneficial way. Thus, when they are least prepared for it, change overwhelms them, and they are usually driven henceforth, by change not of their own design and desires, but have become the pawns of those who gladly control the fate of others. Such personalities, are also an unhealthy development in human beings because they prey on the vulnerabilities of others -- generally those who have not effectively and sufficiently matured in their own mastery of their lives.
So the challenge of the future is not how can the old remain young, as though that was the indication of health, but how do we actualize and manifest health, at every stage of life appropriately to benefit from all these fulfilled and actualized talents and abilities of healthy human personalities and societies? This is the point lost in many discussions on health and well-being -- that people think that simply remaining immature, unrealized, and unfulfilled, is the highest possibilities in society, let alone, a healthy one.
Does an 80 year old need to run a marathon once a month or once a year, or at even at all, to be in healthful conditioning -- while the many who still try to, are the cause of their own injuries, disabilities, and inappropriate and unnecessary wear and tear -- often causing their own pain and misery. One asks, "Does it necessarily have to be that way?," or are there ways of being much better, we have not even become to imagine -- because it hasn't been done that way before?
posted by Mike Hu @ 1:02 PM
1 comments
1 Comments:
One of the first indicators I recognized as "aging," was this inability to recover as quickly as I could as a young, robustly growing person, that allowed me to disdain even the prospect (risks) of injury, because one knew he could recover very quickly, often even stronger.
But most athletes even, will notice that this formidable if not seemingly inexhaustible recovery ability will begin to diminish, often alarmingly beginning at around age 30, and they will be susceptible to injuries that were not possible and imaginable a few years earlier.
Some of the most typical are hamstring pulls and Achilles tendon tears, which are characteristically a muscle contracting predictably well, but then then freezing in that contracted position while the mind gives the muscle the command to relax, or lengthen.
That is the condition for a muscle tear -- in which the mind is giving a set of commands, but the body is not responding appropriately but contradictorily -- to make injury an inevitability.
That seems to be increasing among athletes despite their much greater condition one would think would inure themselves to such possibilities.
It is an experience often observed in older people who produce a simple movement that causes muscle contraction -- from which they go into a severe cramp that they cannot relax, and are panicked by -- because they recognize in that movement that they have no control over their body. Thus, they will not repeat such movements, or be reluctant and wary of such movements -- which precludes healthy exercise (movements) for them, which spirals into further self-imposed immobilities, until they are invariably confined to wheel chairs.
This problem seems to me to be the thickening of the viscosity of the lubricant of the human (animal) body which is mucous of the body (which is its essential fluid state and lubricant for all movement of tissues in the body.
It's most commonly seen forms are from the human gut which lubricates the movement of food and liquids. The other common exposure is the respiratory system. But the major manner of movement in the body, is in the muscles, where such thickening is likely to cause the muscle problems described previously -- when the muscles contract well enough, but have a problem releasing -- which is the muscle filaments normally easily sliding over one another, producing the contraction or relaxation.
This is also the problem of those with soft-tissue pain and injuries characteristic of the autoimmune diseases, in which the cells, tissues, organs simply don't function as they should.
One astute doctor was brave enough to suggest that guaifenesin, the active ingredient of cough medicine, cured fibromyalgia, one of the autoimmune conditions -- while seeming to miss the point that this liquifying of the basic lubricant of the human body, and especially essential in movement, would eliminate vast dysfunctions in even those not diagnosed with diseases yet named -- including the inevitable experiences of "aging."
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