You Are How You Move

That is better which is inherent in things better or prior or more honourable: thus health is better than strength and beauty. Aristotle

You soon realize when you get the body moving that Mind is not separate. Mind starts moving too.

You are how you move, and if you don't move (if you allow machines to convey and carry you), then you are not.

All the great philosophers from Aristotle to Rousseau knew of the powers of the peripatetic. Knew that the body itself did the thinking through its moving...

To give up locomotive force is to die... not in the conventional sense (chance would be a fine thing) but in a much more languidly torturous sense, as in the zombification-obesification of the human.

Since eating is largely a function of moving, of how much energy you have spent and need to replenish, it is more accurate to say that You are how you move before You are what you eat.

In every school a gymnasium, or place for physical exercise, should be established for the children. This much-neglected provision is, in my opinion, the most important part of education, not only for the purpose of forming robust and healthy physiques, but even more for moral purposes, which are either neglected or else sought only through a mass of vain and pedantic precepts which are simply a waste of breath.

(Jean-Jacques Rousseau)

How vain it is to sit down to write when you have not stood up to live! Methinks that the moment my legs begin to move my thoughts begin to flow...A thousand rills which have their rise in the sources of thought burst forth and fertilize my brain…Only while we are in action is the circulation perfect. The writing which consists with habitual sitting is mechanical wooden dull to read. 

(Henry Thoreau)

Not less than two hours a day should be devoted to exercise, and the weather should be little regarded. A person not sick will not be injured by getting wet. It is but taking a cold bath, which never gives a cold to any one. Brute animals are the most healthy, and they are exposed to all weather, and of men, those are healthiest who are the most exposed. The recipe of those two descriptions of beings is simple diet, exercise and the open air, be it's state what it will; and we may venture to say that this recipe will give health and vigor to every other description.

(Thomas Jefferson)

Philosophers have long recognized the curious way that man builds extensions of himself and thus detaches himself from his natural state. Like it or not, technology carries within itself the danger of immobilization.

When I was out jogging this morning (never trust a fat philosopher!) through the lovely little Festival Park I stopped to stretch beside the small wooden bridge over the stream. I looked at my leg, the one I had up on the banister, and marvelled at its beauty. Its musculature and integrity was down to 40 odd years of movement and work. A work that was, at its root, primal, or one might say, radical, for its concentrating on Health.

Health after all is that which accommodates everything; it is the root upon which everything rests in its place. When Health is ignored things lose their place, and become confused. Technology then becomes, in this confusion, not this leg that I am marveling at, its sinews and cartilage, its veins and arteries, and the blood pumping through, and its relation to its environment (I walk and cycle, I do not drive), but some thing else, some thing apart from the body, that digs into the bodymind parasitically, infecting it with a form of socio-economic (when it isn't eco-existential) vampirism.

Once there was a time when the bringing-forth of the true into the beautiful was called techne. And the poiesis of the fine arts also was called techne.

(Martin Heidegger, The Question Concerning Technology, p.34)

I have never know a piece of man-made technology that has helped man without harming him overall in the long run.

And we are, in the final meditation, and whether you like it or not, in it for the long run... (or jog, if you prefer).