Physical Health

Take a seat.

Consider for a moment what your body has actually done for you.

It has regulated, repaired, compensated, and persisted through decades of demands, neglect, poor decisions, and some circumstances entirely beyond your control. It has healed wounds you have forgotten, fought infections you never knew you had, and maintained systems of extraordinary complexity without ever asking for your conscious assistance. In many cases it has done all of this in spite of an owner rather than because of one.

That is worth sitting with. People generally, give more deliberate attention to their finances and their careers than they ever give to their own physical system that makes everything else possible. The irony is considerable.

Retirement changes the equation. Not because the body suddenly becomes fragile — though some slowing and adjustment might be a natural feature of ageing — but because the conditions that sustained physical health during working years often disappear along with the job. 

The incidental exercise of a work routine, the structure that regulated sleep and meals, the social engagement that kept the mind active and the mood steady — all can quietly dissolve, and  the consequences of their absence can accumulate gradually and be easily missed until they are difficult to reverse.

Physical health in retirement is not about performance. It is not about recapturing what the body could do at thirty, or measuring yourself against  any standards intended for younger people. It is about maintaining the capability to live the life you want,  independently, for as long as possible, on your own terms. That is a different and more honest ambition — it is also a more achievable one.

The specifics of how to support that — through what you eat, how you sleep, how you move — will be addressed in the Commentaries that follow.

The foundation is a shift in orientation: from taking the body for granted, as most of us have done for most of our lives, to extending it, something it has arguably always deserved 

Not admiration. Not obsession. Simply consistent, unglamorous attention — the same kind you might finally be giving to the rest of your life.

Jack Lack’s Listening Chair is always here, as is your welcome.