What's the Difference?

What is important to note is that the greatest health benefit of exercise is that it promotes and optimizes the circulation (flow), and when one recognizes that, that can be one's primary objective and focus, and not as we have been conditioned to think -- of running faster, jumping higher, lifting more weight, or making the heart work harder.

The weakness in the circulatory system is the lack of push back towards the heart, and not the lack of push from the heart -- which is the problem of sedentary lives that produce few muscular contractions by the voluntary (skeletal) muscles -- but the heart works unfailingly autonomously. So it behooves one to fix what isn't broken -- while continuing to ignore what actually needs working (fixing). That's why things don't get better.

Instead, such people are sent off an endless wild goose chase — expending as much time, energy and resources as an end in itself, and so they use these arbitrary measures and landmarks to keep them on course — even to the detriment of their lives and health. Still, they will be cheered on to do anything as equally good as any other — which is seldom the case.

Usually there is a difference but one has to discern (discriminate) those differences and not proclaim the “new equity” — that one should ignore all differences and results as “empirical” correctness. Thus it doesn’t matter what one does, or what results one gets — because they are all the same — and one should be blinded for seeing any differences. Sadly, that is what the world is coming to — if present trends continue.

But since the beginning of human consciousness, there have always been a few who see through the haze into the next realm of human development and evolution. That is not a matter of trying harder and effort in the ways that aren’t working, but observing the truth in the false, and the false in the truth — and not equating and denying those realities. Those few make significant gains and advances, while the vast majority think they are doing the same — but not experiencing those same results. The first thing to ask themselves is, are they really doing what they think they are doing? That might explain a lot.

Many think it is enough just to mimick the actions — with no understanding of why they are doing so — as though that were enough, while the far better course, is to first develop as good an understanding of what one is doing — and why. But most are just told to do this or that — arbitrarily, as though that will make a difference. Even if they do the “right” thing, it may be at the wrong time — or place and circumstances — because they lack this greater comprehension of what they are trying to “effect.” A few will even think that the reason to exercise is that they can eat more — and instead, gain even more weight. A better exercise for that, is to fast. No amount of exercise will “burn off” those calories fast enough; that’s just not how any life form is built — or has survived.

Meanwhile, a superior understanding always trumps any amount of brute force — in the accomplishing of anything. Unfortunately, brute force has been the only hammer used in many people’s toolbox. Tools exist to amplify those innate human movements — at the head, hands and feet that account for what we know of human expressions and creativity. Yet that is precisely what we ignore in the design of most exercise programs — the most important and essential organs of the body, and lament when those faculties decline prematurely in the “normally” aging people. Is that normal — or simply what is deliberately not exercised? — in favor of all the wrong things?

But while the former implies the latter, it is not true that the latter implies the former — and that is cause and effect — and the proper understanding of it. One precedes the other — and they are not co-equivalents. But in the understanding that one thing is equal to every other, such chaos and anomie reign — and one hardly begins to know how to extricate themselves from an eternal merry-go-round. — at the end of which, their time is merely up — for better or worse, one does not know the difference.