Reclaimation of Body

It's a long road back to yourself.

I did Pilates today. I was the only guy in the class - just a bunch old ladies, but it was great cos you can adjust the exercise to your ability level. Some I made a lot more physical and others I did the minimum because I don’t have flexibility in my joints despite years of yoga.

I don’t have much coordination or sense of balance. I guess because the umbilical cord was wrapped around my throat when I was born and I passed out, so I guess I got off to a bad start. For the first thirty years of my life I dragged my body around like a sack of potatoes. I guess I thought that physical exercise was for brauny people not awkward intellectual types like me. The thing is - you can get through life perfectly fine without being able to quote Shakespeare or Oscar Wilde, but you can’t stay healthy without taking exercise. A man does not live by bread alone, that much is true, but you need to build a house from the ground up. That means our physiological needs have to be attended to first. Now I consider excercise classes essential to my mental health as well as my physical health. My mind gets so busy I need it as a counterbalance.

Despite, or rather - probably becasue - I have never been physical I have spent over 6 months on yoga retreats. The first was horrendous. I wasn’t fit, strong or flexible. If I had known what I was in for I would have hit the gym for weeks before going so that I wouldn’t have got out of breath the moment I stretched out my hamstrings. Any way I learned all about my body. I have congenital shoulder injuries which will stop me from ever excelling in yoga, part of the practice is to learn to accept where you are and move forward without judgement. And now I love to go along to classes and move this way and that to find out what is going on there. I always stretch in some way I have never done before and discover something about myself.

The question is why wasn’t any of this stuff addressed in school. It seems so obvious to me that what you would do is check what kind of physical level children were at and assign them to an exercise class that is suitable for their level. In a sense school is responsible for indoctrinating me into the idea that some kids are sporty and for exercise and other kids are just meant to be into books and stuff. Couldn’t they have found something for me like pilates? Old people exercise classes have been great for me, we do these little dances and it helps me improve my crappy coordination bit by bit. Couldn’t I have done that in school?

It was worse when I moved to high school because rugby was mandatory for the first 3 years. So me and the fat kids and the other ones that weren’t physical would just “forget” our gear and sit in doing homework while the pe teachers looked upon us with sympathy. What an f’n waste! It’s an outrage when you think about it, isn’t it? Why couldn’t they find something remedial or light for us to do while they physical kids played rugby? It got better in my 4th year because I discovered I could shoot a basket so I enjoyed PE for the rest of school as I got to choose basketball. Thank God my parently liked skiing or I may not have got into any sport before that at all!

That brings up a wider question about school: Why is our world so arrogant about how advanced we are when it comes to the most important things it’s in the dark ages like how they treat people? Why are kids put in classes according to age group instead of ability? That is just stupid! Anyone could tell you that. But it goes on and on. Everyone complains about the education system but no one does anything to change it. Education put me off things like sport, or anything I wasn’t good at, because you are graded and degraded. You aren’t meant to learn things for the joy of exploration - it’s all about external validation from authorities.

So how are we going to create a HEALTHcare system out of this mess instead of just milking people like cash cows when they get sick? People eat pizza with their family, the bond over taking the kids to McDonalds for a Happy Meal and a toy. They drink and take drugs with their friends and have a good time smoking. Then when they go to the doctor the doctor fobs them off saying “eat better, take exercise, drink less, stop smoking.” Then they say “Well you see most disease is preventable but people just don’t want to change their habits!" They’re lazy and ignorant and love junk food.”

Why do we expect people to take care of themselves (which is hard) on their own when people indulge in the easy unhealthy habits as part of a community? Life wan’t meant to be a Solo Adventure. We are Tribal beings.

If we got this right in school we could build better institutions. As I have shown there have been diseaes prevention programs that work but they were ususally stopped because they lost the hospitals money. People’s healthcare providers should involve them in something where they can make friends, chat, and reduce their risk of heart disease all at once.

Those are my thoughts. What is your relationship like with your body? How do you think a supportive education system and healthcare system would look?

Yours, Antony

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