This year I had more than the usual number of people need to cancel scheduled fitness coaching with me because they “have too much going on.”
But of course we have too much going on! The holidays, weddings, babies, and pets have become so garishly overdone that it’s a wonder we have time for anything but overwrought celebrations.
Let fitness lighten your burden, not add to it. Keep the fun in movement so it feels like freedom.
For me, this holiday season was pared down to bare essentials. For numerous reasons, my life is currently filled with top priorities requiring time and energy. It just so happens to also be December, so a lot of the holiday stuff had to get skipped this year. But healthy eating, proper sleep, and fun physical activity didn’t suffer much.
Perhaps more importantly, I shifted to more fun physical activity and less to structured exercise because I needed the physical activity and the lighten of the mental and emotional load.
My hope is that we all stop overcomplicating everyday life and cartoonishly overdoing every major life event and milestone.
What life is like now for too many people
The Christmas holiday season now encompasses all of November and December (1/6th of every year devoted to a single holiday) and is an ever-expanding time of excess – excess spending, eating, drinking, and planning.
Every milestone now isn’t done right unless it is overdone.
For relationships, we have prom-posals, destination proposals (sometimes involving the whole family), destination bachelorette and bachelor parties, destination weddings.
For babies we have babymoons, gender-reveal events (a truly terrible idea from day one), and baby showers that rival wedding receptions. We increasingly overdo birthday parties for kids. And it seems that no one ever gets pregnant while already living in a good school district since nearly everyone seems to need to move to a neighborhood with better schools when they have a baby.
For pets we have pet birthday parties, we constantly dress them up and look for endless ways to anthropomorphize their lives. Even getting a pet has become a “destination event.” I remember when I was a kid, you’d get a new dog or cat when some in your neighborhood had a pet that had a litter. Or you might go to the local pet store. There now seems to be new law that if you are getting a pet it must require – at a minimum – travel of at least one or two states away from where you live.
And people who do most of the above will often bemoan “how hard it is to get in shape and be healthy.”
For us, this Christmas season was a lesson in what nice but unnecessary celebration or decoration you can let go and still maintain the truly important things of life without all the overdone externalities.
Let’s stop forcibly cramming so much “fun” into every life event that it no longer is. Let fun movement be an essential part of your life, day in, day out. Forever.