I’m halfway through this mercifully (and appropriately!) short little book by Bridget Watson Payne called “How Time is on Your Side.” And I know that for me, and maybe for a lot of other people who might have similar goals, “not enough time” is high on the list of reasons for health and fitness to take a backseat.

There are a lot of gems in it. I am especially struck by this quote from poet Mary Oliver: “The most regretful people on earth are those who felt the call to creative work, who felt their own creative power restive and uprising, and gave to it neither power nor time.” Spot on. Don’t be one of those people.

The overarching idea of the book is imagining a relationship with time that is not based on scarcity and adversariality (is that a word? Adversarial-ness?). That time can be your friend. Not your enemy, or something that is always off in the distance that you can never catch up to. That this is a real possibility.

And that is part of the overarching idea behind Fitter by Fifty. Re-imagining not just my relationship to Time, but lots of other things as well. Health, Fitness, Food, Fun. I have a feeling that this is a real can of worms I’m opening here. Big, juicy worms (maybe I’ll go fishing). Part of the reason things don’t work well, and I just get older and stiffer and less energetic, is that I’m not in right relationship with these Big Ideas. If Time, Health, Fitness, Food, Family…etc are not just stuff, but living beings in the animist sense, then when I get in better relationship with them, I won’t be struggling anymore. Struggling to fit them in, prioritize, balance…etc. We will be an Ecology.

Well that got abstract, fast. My next post will just be about shoes, or something like that. I’ll talk about barefoot shoes.

My final insight: I’ve got to remember to write this blog in first person. I’m writing for me, about me. If other people read it and resonate and want to talk about it, great. But I’ve spent a lot of my life talking about “we” and “us” and maybe avoiding getting really granular with myself, and I think that’s part of what is required for me to make this Fitter by Fifty thing a success. Deal.