Wellness Rewrite

Well, hey there, everybody. Happy Tuesday. In a weird week where it may feel like Monday to you, it may feel like the middle of the week or an extended weekend. It's the beautiful thing about these live streams here on Cadre. It provides you a little touch base that as the world shifts around you, you know that the Cadre is going to be here for you. So my name is JC Lippold. If we never shared time together before, thanks for allowing me the opportunity to connect with you, to hold space for you, and to provide a little space for mind and heart to do what the mind and heart does.

On Tuesday nights, we do wellness rewrite, where I bring either a phrase or a concept or a word that is very popular in the wellness context and offer a little bit of maybe different perspective. So tonight I thought it would be a good idea to talk about the idea of exercise. What do you think of when you hear the word exercise? Maybe you think your workout, maybe you think about the gym, maybe you think about the push, the grind, the kick, the kill for you. Maybe exercise is, you know, moving your body is more for your mind or more for your spirit than it is for your body.

But often exercise is put into a very specific category of it's something that we do in an isolated amount of time in our day, in our week. And I want to tell a story that shifted the idea of exercise for me. So I have a chapter of my life that is filled with running, running races. As a kid who was never able to run the mile, I faked injuries and asthma attacks every single track and field day, and in my adult years, started to look at running as an opportunity, maybe to reclaim a little bit of myself that I never gave myself the chance to get to know.

So as I became a marathon runner, as an adult, I was with, no, I don't know what my pr is. I don't have any desire to get faster or to get better at doing at doing the marathon. But I appreciate being in a world where I get to be around other people who are doing something that maybe they've been told their whole lives that they're not capable of doing, like running a marathon. So I'm a runner. We all are. But this story comes from my running world. So I ran the sea weeze half marathon in Vancouver, British Columbia, a handful of times, but one year specifically resonates with me in tonight's conversation.

1 day of the race, was the day that I moved my body. The least amount of distance on our trip to Vancouver, because, you see, Vancouver is a big city, and it's a city where there's lots of things to see. So each day we walked around the city to see the sights, to be in the middle of the water and the mountains and all of the natural elements, and then all of a sudden, juxtaposed against this big, beautiful, worldly city. 1 mile. And on the day of the half marathon was the day that I ended up moving the least because I conserved my energy for the race.

And then I rested and recovered the rest of the day. How often do we look at exercise as the thing that we do, like the half marathon and not everything else that we do in our lives, right? Our life is a verb. It's an action. It's an evolution. It's not a noun. Living your life is exercise. Perhaps you're one of the majority of people who feels bad when you don't get to the gym. Maybe you're one of those people who say, oh, I don't exercise. I don't have time, because you're too busy chasing after your kids or doing your job or living up to your responsibilities and those people that you care for and the passions that you live out.

You have no time left after you do all of those things. That's exercise. I take a page from my parents generation's book where my mom will often say, my exercise is getting down on the floor and washing the floor and vacuuming and laundrying and taking care and being in the yard and gardening and walking the animals and so on and so forth. Exercise is in every single element of what we do, but it loses its potency and power if we don't give ourselves credit for doing those things. When I got back from Vancouver, everyone said, wow, how was the half marathon?

And by golly, the way that I led that story every single time in response was, you wanna know what? Which half marathon are you talking about? You talking about the day of the race? Are you talking about every other day that I traveled around the city more? Take some consideration. Hey, Christine, nice to see you. Take some consideration as to what you don't merit as exercise in your life and see how it changes its impact when you start to give it credit. You are living life, and that is a verb, an evolution.

It is an action. This is not a noun. It's not a stagnant state of being every time you stand, every time you walk the dog, every time you hug, every time you climb the stairs, every time you go outside, every time you bundle up, if it's cold out, every time that you do the good deed for the neighborhood, every time you go to target, every time you pick up the 40 pound bag of dog food. That is all exercise. Your body's benefiting from it. Maybe your mind and spirit should, too. So every Tuesday, we take a little time to rewrite some wellness.

And tonight we've been talking about rewriting the idea of exercise from being the thing you do at the gym or the thing you do for 30 minutes a day to the life that you live fully, passionately. You're doing it, Cadre. So keep going. Have a good night or a good morning or a good day, or whenever you listen to this, wherever you are, know that we are here as part of your Cadre, a special group of people with a special intention. We'll see you soon. Have a good one.