Not exercise, but movement

Health and Mobility are my desired companions.  I want to be able to get about, just in case there is a good reason to do so. 

For example, tonight I am catching a ride to an activity in a city 40 miles away.  My fifty-year old son and his younger wife, along with my grandson, Torin, are in a one-act play.  The event is actually a series of seven, one-act plays.  You will laugh, perhaps, that I consider the ride over, the time I spend there, and the ride back to be an exertion that merits any consideration in my daily list of challenges.

Getting out of my current domicile is essential to my goal for mobility and at the same time, I must have mobility to get out and about.  "Get out"? you ask.  As if someone is holding me prisoner.  I hold myself prisoner, sometimes.  Tonight will be a "leave", a "pass", that I will award myself.  I will enjoy the plays.  I will enjoy the company; I will not miss my Monday night TV shows. 

In preparation, I have run a couple of errands.  Reasons to get up, get dressed, not sit on my bum all day or take a nap.  The errands are exertion, this morning.  The walk out to the car, getting in and out of the car, going in the K-Mart and picking up a necessary medication, acquiring a smattering of snacks for the "trip" tonight...these are all exercise to me.  Mobility choices. 

I "made" myself go to Chick Fil-A, after the K-Mart jaunt; I needed protein, after all.  My first meal of the day is consumed after noon, but then, as my friends who know me well, will tell you, I slept in this morning. 

My final stop is the produce market where I spend $5.67 for 4 pieces of fruit and a tray of blueberries (not yet in season for our local area, but available through the auspices of Dole and their tropical reach, maybe).

For many years, my mother didn't have to attend exercise classes.  She was a busy bee at home and in the community.   She hung her clothes out on a clothesline, she worked in the yard, she fed the family, mended and sewed and in general, kept herself fit because she was raised/reared to be this person.  Then she "celebrated" a birthday that put her over the hill.  We kids left home and there wasn't as much to do that engaged her attention.  And pounds were threatening to decimate her wardrobe.  My mother was nothing if not well dressed (at least when she went out in public).

So mother and dad purchased a membership (lifetime) at the local YMCA, (now defunct).  Mother, true to form, wasn't really into exercise per Se, but she was interested in dancing.  She faithfully attended Libby McSheehy's aerobic dancing//jazz-er-size and fought for the rest of her life the battle of the bulge.

I'm not my mother's child in energetic first responding to weight gain and mobility.  I realize that it cost her something, that she displayed courage, was the original commitment maker, and that she was so far beyond me in self-discipline it makes my feeble efforts to keep moving, pale beside her example.