I’ve spent nineteen years being grateful for something I barely thought about for the first 55.
My body.
At 55, I wasn’t feeling particularly grateful for it.
I had type 2 diabetes. I was carrying 98 extra pounds. My feet hurt. My knee hurt. My back hurt. My shoulder hurt.
Several surgeries were being discussed.
It was pretty easy to look at my body and think:
Well, I guess I broke the damn thing.
And to be fair, I’d given it a pretty good run. 😂
Years of sports injuries. Too much weight. Not enough attention to what I ate. Not enough of the right kind of movement.
Then I started changing things.
And my body responded.
That’s the Part That Still Amazes Me
Not that I changed.
That my body did.
After everything I’d put it through, it didn’t hold a grudge.
It didn’t say, Sorry, Dave. You had your chance.
I changed how I ate and my weight started changing.
I moved and my body got better at moving.
I discovered resistance stretching and joints that I’d thought were headed toward surgery began behaving differently.
Little by little, the body I’d pretty much given up on started coming back.
Nineteen years later, that still amazes me.
Bodies Respond
Not perfectly.
Not forever.
And certainly not to everything.
I’ve gotten more careful about saying things like, “Your body will heal if you just give it what it needs.”
Sometimes it won’t.
Bodies get injured.
Bodies get diseases.
Cancer doesn’t disappear because somebody ate the right dinner.
Eventually every one of our bodies will encounter something it can’t simply repair.
That’s life.
But between “the body can heal everything” and “there’s nothing you can do” is an enormous amount of territory.
That’s where I want to live.
Because our bodies are remarkably responsive.
Give a muscle something appropriate to do and it can get stronger.
Practice balance and balance can improve.
Walk regularly and walking gets easier.
Change what you eat and your metabolism may respond.
Sleep better and you may feel different.
Start using some of the range of motion you’ve lost and you may discover some of it wasn’t gone after all.
At 55, I didn’t know how much room I still had to change.
I’m glad I found out.
Then Peggy Got Cancer
This gave both of us a very different reason to think about the body.
Peggy had spent years moving, teaching, walking, eating well and generally taking care of herself.
Then she developed non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma anyway.
That’s an important part of the story.
Healthy people can get sick.
Doing everything “right” doesn’t buy you immunity from life.
Peggy needed chemotherapy.
She got chemotherapy.
And she responded remarkably well to treatment.
She kept teaching through much of it. She kept moving when she could. We kept walking.
I can’t tell you how much her previous health contributed to how she handled treatment.
Nobody can.
But I can tell you I was grateful she’d spent all those years building strength, movement, relationships, purpose and a life she loved.
When something hard arrived, she had a lot of life around the illness.
I think that matters.
Maybe Gratitude Comes Before Something Is Gone
We tend to appreciate our bodies when they stop doing something.
Suddenly the shoulder you never thought about becomes the most important shoulder in the world.
Try hurting your big toe sometime.
You’ll discover you’ve apparently been using the damn thing for everything. 😂
Maybe we don’t have to wait.
Your body carried you here.
Whatever shape it’s in.
Whatever you’ve done to it.
Whatever you wish you’d done differently.
It’s still here.
And there may be things you can do today that help it do tomorrow a little better.
Not because you’re declaring war on aging.
Not because you’re trying to live forever.
Because this is the body you’ve got.
And life is considerably more fun when the two of you are getting along.
Start With Something Small
Take the walk.
Move something that hasn’t moved much lately.
Eat something that leaves you feeling good afterward.
Get some sleep.
Go outside.
Don’t do it because I promised your body will reward you.
Pay attention and see what happens.
That’s really what I’ve been doing for nineteen years.
Trying something.
Listening.
Adjusting.
Trying again.
And being continually surprised by how often my body says:
Yep. I can work with that.
After 55 years of me not paying much attention to it, I think that’s pretty generous.