When I was a kid, in my town it was unusual enough to see a 20 year old guy with an awesome physique, let alone a 40 year old married man with kids—and that local Tarzan happened to be my next door neighbor Helen’s sister’s husband, and whenever he visited, I was in awe.
The men in my neighborhood, looking nothing like that, predictably were not at all impressed or influenced to follow his example—at least not outwardly. But his influence on me has far outlived him.
The culture in my neighborhood while growing up was lawn-pride. Men spent all weekend buying multiple sacks of varying amendments and spreading them on their lawn, clipping and edging and trimming and renting heavy equipment such as lawn rollers and a heavy gizmo that punched hundreds of holes in the lawn to aerate and hydrate. Men would spend 6 hours on a Saturday tending to their lawn, watering and weeding, and zero hours working out or engaging in athletic activities.
Then, as a grown up I’d watch This Old House and similar TV programs in that genre and there too would be men spending their entire weekend in quest of the perfect lawn, struggling to bend over due to their giant bellies and huffing and puffing after relatively little exertion.
It made me wonder at the logic applied by these lawn men for not providing the same care to their one-and-only forever body as they did their temporary lawns. It clearly was foolish to waste so much time, effort and money on something as fleeting as a lawn, especially in a climate where it snowed 7 months out if the year, when their bodies, which were called upon to perform 24/7/365, went ignored and disrespected.
That was the culture back then, and although things have improved remarkably in that respect, basically that remains the culture: people applying outsized disproportionate importance to the unimportant while ignoring what was truly important, crucial and irreplaceable: their body, their strength, their health and physical ability.
People’ priorities tell their story.
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