As Easy as Breathing

Previously I've warned of the dangers and undesirability of stressing the heart by making it work harder and faster -- as though that was ever (always) a wise thing to do, much less doing it for its own sake.

The heart is far and away the hardest working muscle (organ) of the body -- and contracts a mind-boggling 100,000+ times a day -- just to maintain life at its most rudimentary level, and one of the noted dangers of exercise, has been an enlarging of the heart and thickening of the heart by repeated demands to accommodate high stress levels and demands -- usually leading to a premature shortening of life and/or disability caused at the weak point of the individual's systems. People are unique in that way of being prone to individual vulnerabilities -- much like Achilles' heel (tendon), many people's backs, knees, aneurysms, dementias and depressions. And so we all don't die in the same way, have the same (chronic) conditions to have to deal with all our lives, or have the same strengths as well as weaknesses.

But for all the living, the heart is an autonomic function -- which we are born with as our essential metabolic function and rate -- unique to each individual. The next step beyond though, is something much more variable, although autonomic to a great extent also yet it can be modified greatly -- and is the basis for many time-honored health regimens (practices) that have stood the test of time, and that is the breathing movement, or function. We can hold our breath -- but if we hold it too long, we pass out and it reverts to being an autonomic function as it must.

This then is the essential movement we have control over to modify -- safely and healthfully. So when we can understand that function well, we would intelligently make that the primary objective as the most valuable "activity" (practice) a person would consciously and deliberately engage in -- decidedly in preference over walking (especially in the cold/hot, rain and dark), running (with its high impact), pushups, situps, and all the other movements and activities "contrived" to make one healthier, and thus, more highly functioning as the base level for anything they might do in the course of their lives -- which makes them more fit and prone to survive, and even thrive at the highest levels, individually and/or in community.

This they naturally do because that is the consciousness and awareness of the brain functioning on the higher level in which it connects with other brains as though it is one -- rather than struggling against every other, which is obviously the brain functioning at a very low level and consciousness -- thinking even, that they have to completely reinvent the wheel, every time they want to do something, and so are easily discouraged and dissuaded not to.

In the early 50s and 60s, the most popularly performed bodybuilding movement, was not the bench press or squat, but an exercise done prior to such strenuous movements if they were done at all, that was called the Lying straight arm pullover to articulate the greatest difference between the girth of the chest and the girth of the waist moving the arms backward, and then bringing the arms and head forward to a contraction (compression) along with concurrent movement at the hands and feet to effect all the muscles as though it were just one, which is essentially breathing with the entire movement of the body.

The original Nautilus machine was also designed around this one basic and valued movement -- which was the one exercise the inventor originally thought was essential to do -- before creating machines for each bodypart at the height of the movement towards specialization in everything. That was also the time in which IBM mainframe computers, did all the data processing for every other field of activity, because that was their specialized function -- so one could not know the results of anything, until one got the results back on the IBM printouts.

There was every reason to believe that increasing specialization and fragmentation of comprehension would continue -- with everyone just knowing a tiny slice of their own world, apart from all the others. It was not thought necessary or even possible, that one should have a comprehensive understanding of the world as a whole, because in that grand scheme of things, every individual was just a mindless cog doing what they were told (expected) to do, in the assembly line society envisioned prior to "1984."

Then the world changed -- beginning ten years earlier, with the great market crash of 1974 -- signaling a great change was in the making, a movement away from uniform lives in a uniform society. The ten years from 1974-1984, culminating and symbolized by the ending of society as a machine dominated by centralized planning and determination by a few self-designated experts (technocrats), began its reversal to the present-day decentralization of all authority -- as exhibited by the present day chaotic, distinctly disorganized (random) movements.

But it is not just enough to be against the old; one has to have a better idea of how individuals and societies work -- and simply "more of the same," will not be the answer to the challenge of the times anymore. Something fundamentally and profoundly has changed -- to a higher realization of making the most out of what one already has. That is the key to why some can make it on $10,000 a year, while some cannot make do on $100,000 a year. It's no longer about the money -- but what greater values one can exchange it for. Many of those exchanges, will result in no value received, no matter how much money is given for it. It is foremost, an exchange of information -- in determining credible, verifiable, authentic and useful information, from that which is promoted merely to maximize the gain from those transactions -- while providing little or nothing in return.

That's how much the world has changed -- and what we must do now, to optimize our lives in going with that flow.