Growing or Dying

Years ago someone told me this simple truth:
Nothing in life is ever stagnant.  Everything is either growing or it is dying.  There is no middle ground.

As long as someone chooses to do nothing beneficial to his health, he will be in a state of gradual dying.  Chances are likely that you know people who have chosen just such a life.  The light of life has left them.  Their fondest desire is to make it to the weekend so they can "rest" - the code word for doing absolutely nothing.  Their most exertive activity is walking to and from the car or fridge.

A person in this state of existence surely is dying.  They are essentially committing protracted suicide.  Their inert bodies cease to function properly.  Body systems begin to weaken.  Muscles atrophy until the very act of standing and walking becomes a labor.  The weakened body becomes susceptible to sickness and disease - type-2 diabetes, hypertension, heart disease, cancer, and a host of other maladies - until it just gives up.  Everything stops.

Death.

Contrast all of that dying with the person whose body is constantly in motion (relatively speaking, of course).  The muscles get stronger, the body leaner, and the senses sharper.  This body is growing, changing for the better.  LIVING.

It's all a matter of choice.  Our human condition affords us the uncanny opportunity to choose which path to walk.  We can choose to get up and move or sit down and vegetate.  We choose to live, or we choose to die.

Often a choice is never made; one just engages in death by default because the choice to grow and live was never made.  There is no escaping choice (cue The Matrix Reloaded music).

Sometimes people are fooled into thinking that they no longer have a choice - they're too old or too fat to get moving.  These delusions are the by-product of an earlier forgotten choice (or failure to make a choice) to let death have its way for however long it takes to run its course.

However it works out, the fact remains: people are where they are because they choose to be there.

Occupying the middle ground is impossible, because, well, the middle ground does not exist.  The minute one stops exercising, the minute he stops engaging in regular movement, or the minute he decides to go back to eating junk is the same minute his body begins the regressive path toward death.  There is no "in between" place.  Sure, the body will take time to add the pounds back on, but the dying process truly began with the choice to neglect the body and its needs.

We all face the same choice - growing or dying.  Refusing or failing to choose is the equal to choosing the path toward an early grave.  Choosing to grow through exercise and nutrition is a choice to live.

It doesn't get any clearer than that.

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